Many Twitter users are adding a rat emoji next to their name as a sign of protest against Elon Musk’s proposed plan of charging users $8 per month for the blue ‘verified’ check mark. Twitter is undergoing a slew of changes following Elon Musk’s takeover late last month, including a revamped Home page for logged-out users. While the original Home page showed a simple username and password prompt for users to log in to their account, the new Home page now displays trending tweets and news stories.
However, not all changes have been so innocuous. On the first day after his takeover, Musk fired the former CEO, Parag Agarwal, and instituted himself as the chief executive of the company. CFO Ned Segal and legal affairs and policy chief Vijaya Gadde were also fired alongside Agarwal. As for the controversial new fee for the ‘verified’ check mark, Musk first proposed charging $20 for it before settling for $8 following protests from many users. One such user who protested against the proposed fee was acclaimed horror novelist Stephen King, who threatened to leave Twitter if the company started charging for the ‘verified’ badge.
On Wednesday, #RatVerfieid became the no. 1 trending topic for some time on Twitter in the U.S. after many users started using the hashtag to protest against Musk’s proposed $8 monthly subscription charge for the blue verification badge. The hashtag was created by Twitter user and cartoonist Alex Cohen, who called on others on the platform to use a rat emoji next to their name rather than pay Musk for verification.
A Protest Against The Verification Fee
By Wednesday afternoon, the movement gained massive momentum, with many users adding a rat emoji and using the #RatVerified hashtag as a sign of disapproval for Musk’s proposed verification fee. Cohen also created a Twitter poll, asking users who they think would win – Musk’s $44 billion or a rat. More than 44,000 people voted, with the rat winning by a landslide 93.6 percent votes.
Talking to Newsweek about his motivation to create #RatVerified, Cohen said that despite the flaws of the current verification system, it is still the better option for Twitter, as it “helps users spot fake accounts and identify trusted sources of information.” According to him, paying for verification will not only not solve any of the outstanding issues surrounding verification but, in fact, make things worse by making Twitter harder to navigate. He signed off, saying, “I’d rather stick a rat next to my name than support pay-to-play tweeting, and clearly others feel the same way!”