Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of Twitter, revealed on Friday that the platform will be introducing various colored badges to identify between accounts.

“Sorry for the delay, we’re tentatively launching Verified on Friday next week,” he tweeted.

“Gold check for companies, grey check for government, blue for individuals (celebrity or not) and all verified accounts will be manually authenticated before check activates.”

In another tweet, Musk said all verified individual accounts would have the same blue check, but some would eventually be able to display a “secondary tiny logo showing they belong to an org(anisation) if verified as such by that org(anisation)”.

Since acquiring the social media company last month, Elon Musk's plan for users to pay to be "certified" and get a blue badge on their accounts has created controversy.

Musk suggested an $8 monthly membership charge to enable people to receive the blue check, which was previously free but restricted for organizations and prominent persons to prevent impersonation and misrepresentation.

The first deployment of Musk's subscription scheme in early November went horribly wrong, with many users depositing the blue check and then impersonating global leaders, celebrities, or corporations.

Responding to the uproar, Musk pushed back the launch date to November 29, only to push it back again. It now looks that the functionality will be available on December 2.

Musk has said that he intends to charge users for memberships to the social media network in order to diversify its revenue source. Twitter presently relies on advertising to generate 90% of its income.

Several large businesses have pulled their ads from the site since Musk purchased it, worried that his promised relaxation of content filtering will expose their brands to being connected with harmful material.

According to the non-profit Media Matters, half of Twitter's top 100 advertisers have stated or "appear to have paused" their spending on the social network.

AFP