Musk has tried to justify the new charge by saying “we need to pay the bills somehow”. We know your pain, Elon. Except you’re now the overlord of one of the most powerful social media platforms in the world with a track record of incredible innovation. Charging your users for a verification tick is the best you can come up with??

We, on the other hand, don’t have a billionaire overlord dictating to us what we can or cannot publish. And that’s the way we like it. That’s why we ask our readers to help support us… as a voluntary contribution (not a mandated paywall or blue-tick charge). 

So, what’s the issue with billionaire overlords running media in any form?

Their biases, basically.

We all have them, but when one man – and the owner of Twitter – tweets out to 110 million followers to vote Republican in the upcoming midterm elections, you have to wonder why.

It’s not going to require an in-depth Scorpio investigation to figure it out. The Democratic Party wants to tax billionaires more and give tax incentives to union-made electric cars. Tesla, Musk’s company, doesn’t have unions at its factories in the US. There’s them biases – loud and clear.

The real media – news media – is the Fourth Estate. Our job is never to tell our readers who to vote for. We are neutral because the minute our personal biases interfere with our work we stop serving you, the reader. You just want to know the facts and that’s what we deliver day in and day out. It’s up to our readers to choose who to vote for.

Our mission at Daily Maverick is “Defend Truth” – something we’ve been doing for more than 13 years now. Our biggest challenge in achieving this is disinformation from social media users with nefarious agendas.

Will a blue tick (that can now be bought) truly be sufficient verification that what you’re reading is real? Or will it be something that wannabe influencers are going to use in an attempt to gain some credibility?

While Pretoria’s “finest” send truth into a tailspin, we need to ask our readers to help us keep going. Less than 0.2% of our readers support our work to keep it free for everyone to access it. That’s 19,000 Maverick Insider members who are paying for 10 million readers.

If you have a spare R141 per month, are you going to pay for a blue tick on Twitter or keep Daily Maverick around? You may not think that this debate affects you, but when our elections are upon us, do you want the truth out there for ALL South Africans to access for free, or do you want a billionaire media overlord, fuelled by his biases, influencing voters?

We know not all of our readers can pay, and that’s the point. If you can contribute, sign up to Maverick Insider and Defend Truth.

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