The worst part is that it's not only about verification. Your replies and tweets will also get prioritized so that you pretty much have to pay if you still want your replies to someone to be seen. So in the end, if you don't pay, your tweets and replies are considered to be less important. And that's what Elon Musk calls freedom of speech and fighting a lord and peasant system. This exactly is a much bigger lord and peasant system. "If you don't have money or don't want to pay, your tweets are worthless"

This guy always fools everyone and so many just don't get it.

Agree with most of this. 

It is kind of a "Pay to win" -type of situation.

Twitter is not a government agency, does not have a monopoly on media, and is not doing anything out of the ordinary to moderate their social media platform at scale. Putting them in the same conversation as Russian state media is an enormous reach.

You don't agree that misinformation is threatening the integrity of our democratic systems? That blatant lies about election fraud and theft cause people to no longer believe in and reject the electoral process?

And what about Twitter's freedom to moderate and control their own platform? Should the government force them to host content they don't want to that is against their Terms of Service? Freedom of speech does not entitle you to a megaphone on whatever private platform you want. Being banned from a private platform for violating its ToS is not a violation of free speech.

That has well and truly TICKED me off.?

Of course they are not in the same league, but the implications of controlled information flow is the same. Whoever set the rules set the truth, no matter if the truth is actually the truth or not.  

Don't know what lies about election fraud you are talking about, but there have been election frauds in some parts of the world. Is it wrong to point them out to keep the general publics trust in the system? Lies can be exposed, truth can't. The easiest way to spot a bullshitter is letting him spew out his lies for some time. 

Twitter is free to set what ever terms for use of their service they want and i totally agree that there is no right in freedom of speech for a "megaphone" to use. I just prefer that such a platform exists. Forcing someone to publish something is imo worse than stopping something from being published, but I think both is bad.

I barely use twitter

Where are legitimate cases of election fraud being censored by Twitter?

Tell that to these guys:

or these guys:

I don’t mind telling them or anyone else that it is the best way to determine if someone can be trusted or not.

Here is what no one can seem to explain to me. If everyone can pay for a checkmark, then what is preventing someone from just duping a famous person? How are they going to differentiate between fake accounts and real ones? Red checkmarks for famous people, blue ones for subscribers? It makes no sense to me.

I think we're about to find out as soon as they get this done. It's probably going to involve identifying yourself in some 'trusted' way when paying for the checkmark, but I bet it's not going to be all that reliable. Is there really a way to reliably identify people across the world from different countries, especially when all you really want to do is get their money using as little effort as possible? That said, the number of 'verified' fake accounts should, for the most part, be fairly small due to the associate cost (I hope), which should make it relatively easy to moderate such accounts. I'm not terrible convinced of this approach though, and I fully expect this to be abused anyway in some creative manner.