At the weekend, Twitter boss Elon Musk called for charges to be brought against corona expert Anthony Fauci. The US government is outraged. The request is “disgusting and disconnected from reality,” says a spokeswoman for the White House.

At the same time as the introduction of a new paid subscription on Twitter, the US government reacted indignantly to attacks by company boss Elon Musk on its top corona adviser Anthony Fauci. Musk’s call for Fauci to be indicted is “incredibly dangerous,” said White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre. Musk’s statements in his online network are “disgusting and disconnected from reality”.

On Sunday, Musk called for Fauci to be charged, who has been advising the government since the beginning of the corona pandemic in the USA in early 2020 and has been vehemently opposed by many right-wingers. There were several death threats against the 81-year-old. President Joe Biden’s top coronavirus adviser has announced that he will retire this month.

The government’s criticism of Musk coincided with the Twitter boss’s new attempt to launch a paid subscription for users. The Twitter Blue service was launched in the first countries on Monday. With this, users are asked to check out for the verification of their user account by the white tick in a blue circle.

The tick, which indicates that a user account has been verified by Twitter, was previously free and was awarded to politicians, celebrities, journalists and organizations. In future, a paid subscription will be a prerequisite for the coveted verification tick on a user account.

After buying Twitter in October, new owner and billionaire Elon Musk said he wanted to expand the company’s revenue streams beyond advertising and develop new paid offerings. A paid subscription version of Twitter Blue, launched in November, was quickly shut down due to the emergence of many fake accounts using users pretending to be celebrities or businesses.