Twitter Expands Blue Subscription Service to Users in Japan

Twitter has extended the paid plan in Japan after introducing Elon Musk's variant of the Twitter Blue subscription service last month in five nations, namely the US, the UK, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, reported first by TechCrunch.

Japanese users will be able to purchase the subscription for ¥980 ($7.40) a month on the web and ¥1,380 ($10.42) per month on iOS, according to Twitter's support page.

These costs are slightly less than the $8 monthly fee for the web and the $11 monthly fee for the iOS offered in the US.

Twitter Blue currently offers features like the blue verification badge, lengthier video uploads, priority ranking in discussion answers, a thread reader, and an edit tweet option, as well as unique symbols and themes.

Although some of these features were already available in the previous iteration of the paid membership, others like the verification mark, a larger upload limit for videos, and an improvement in rankings have just been added.

"We're also piloting a new service called Twitter Blue for Business, which is a service for business entities on Twitter that adds a gold checkmark to official business accounts," the social network wrote on its support page.

Musk's Grand Ambitions

Musk had grand ambitions for Twitter when he took the reins, including increasing user numbers to lessen reliance on ad revenue. In November, he initially debuted a new version of Twitter Blue but had to turn it off since various users were impersonating celebrities and prominent figures.

The platform has since made an effort to impose restrictions on the new verification system by requiring users to have a phone number in order to purchase the Blue subscription and imposing a 90-day cooling-off period for new accounts.

Twitter's manual verification procedure, which involves checking user names and bios, is not functioning as intended. Last week, a reporter for the Washington Post was successful in creating a false online identity for Senator Edward J. Markey.

A few safeguards are in place with the debut of the Blue service to control the chaos. Specifically, users must agree to the modified terms in the new version before signing up.

In addition to requiring a verified phone number, the relaunch now includes a "lightly described review process."

According to Twitter, new accounts that are less than 90 days old are not permitted to subscribe.

Users will also unintentionally lose the coveted blue checkmark whenever they change their profile picture, username, or display name. But as soon as the adjustments are approved, it is expected to return.