The New York Times reported that more than 130,000 people paid $8 for a subscription to the micro-blogging service.
The Times reported on data from a Berlin-based software developer who found over 137,000 accounts with a computer program. The data downloaded by the program included user's following lists, screen time, and verification status.
Mika Salamanca, a YouTube creator with over a million followers, was one of the people Brown found that had over a million followers.
Kyle Rittenhouse, Libs of TikTok, and Catturd2 are just a few of the far-right people who subscribe to the social networking site.
According to Brown's data, thousands of subscribers were linked to around 5,000 far-right accounts that had been flagged for pushing extremists and some were listed by Cornell University for posting conspiracy theories about election fraud.
They did not respond to the request for comment about the data.
The past month has seen a lot of chaos. On November 5th, a day after Musk laid off half of the company's employees, the subscription feature was launched.
George W. Bush, Tony Blair, and O.J. Simpson were impersonated by a number of trollers. Volkswagen, Pfizer, and other companies stopped advertising on the platform because they were frightened by this. The paid verification system was revoked by Musk.
Musk made the feature available again on November 11 but then revoked it the next day. On November 29th, Musk said that he would restart Blue Verified.
The Blue relaunch is on hold until the platform can resolve impersonation issues with high confidence.
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