X Removes ‘New York Times’ , Verification Badge. The gold “verified” badge was removed on Oct. 17 without notice, ‘The Washington Post’ reports. The gold “verified” badge was removed on Oct. 17 without notice, ‘The Washington Post’ reports. The news company has 55 million followers on the platform. As of Oct. 19, other ‘New York Times’ accounts still had verification badges. X CEO Elon Musk has often expressed his contempt for various news agencies. In August, he said that ‘The New York Times’ supports “calls for genocide” and “if ever there was a time to cancel that publication, it is now.”. X went on to instate “a five-second delay for clicks” to the publication’s website, ‘The Washington Post’ reports. The delay was removed after ‘The Washington Post’ reported on it. On Oct. 5, X removed news article headlines and “demoted posts with links,” according to ‘The Washington Post.’. Musk said the move was to encourage users to spend more time on the platform, and “there is less time spent if people click away.”. According to Cardiff University professor Karin Wahl-Jorgensen, the changes are “part of a larger trend toward making Twitter/X more difficult for news organizations to use.”. It is likely to have a significant adverse impact on click-through rates, because platform users will no longer have the necessary context to understand the content of links — and therefore little reason to click on them, Karin Wahl-Jorgensen, Cardiff University professor, via ‘The Washington Post’
