Demirtas responds to Musk who announced plan to charge blue ticks

The imprisoned former co-chair of the pro-Kurdish Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) responded to Twitter's new owner who recently announced that users will be charged monthly for the blue tick that has been free.

Elon Musk said on Tuesday, after his $44 billion takeover of the social media site:

"We need to pay the bills somehow! Twitter cannot rely entirely on advertisers. How about $8?"

A blue tick symbol next to the username indicates a verified account and serves as a mean of identifying reliable sources on Twitter.

The former HDP co-chair Selahattin Demirtas, who has been incarcerated in Turkey's Edirne prison since November 2016 and who uses Twitter to frequently deliver his messages to the public, addressed Musk, saying on Thursday:

"Hi Elon! It’s not nice of you to mess with the blue tick as soon as you purchased the platform. You, bosses, already monetize users. So, it should be you who has to pay. How about $7 per month?"

Demirtas's tweet received thousands of likes and were retweeted hundreds of times in about an hour after it was posted.