For months now, Elon Musk has been threatening to take away the verified, the famous and coveted blue check. I speak in first person because I was one of those verified. Until yesterday.
After an initial threat earlier this month, Elon Musk decided that yesterday, April 20, 2023, would be the day of reckoning for all those verified who did not pay Twitter Blue.
After several failed attempts, Twitter on Thursday began to make good on its promise to remove Blue checks from accounts that do not pay a monthly fee to maintain them.
Hundreds of thousands of users are left without blue check on Twitter
Twitter had about 300,000 verified users with the original blue verification system, many of them journalists, athletes and public figures.
The checkmarks, which used to signify that Twitter had verified that the account was who it claimed to be, began disappearing from these users’ profiles late in the afternoon.
Among the high-profile users who lost their blue checkmarks on Thursday were Beyoncé, Pope Francis, Oprah Winfrey and Donald Trump.
The costs of maintaining the marks range from $8 per month for individual web users to a starting price of $1,000 per month to verify an organization, plus $50 per month for each affiliate or employee account.
This way Twitter will not verify individual accounts, as was the case with the previous blue check handed out during the platform’s administration prior to Trump’s presidency.
Famous users, from basketball star LeBron James to writer Stephen King, have resisted joining, though on Thursday all three had blue checks indicating the account had paid for verification.
Celebrities have started to make fun of Elon Musk
“My Twitter account says I have subscribed to Twitter Blue. I haven’t. My Twitter account says I’ve given out a phone number. I have not,” King tweeted Thursday. “Just so you know.”
In a response to King’s tweet, Elon Musk said “You’re welcome namaste” and in another tweet said he is “paying for some personally.” He later tweeted that he was only paying for King, Shatner and James.
A very dangerous decision
It wasn’t just celebrities and journalists who lost their blue checks on Thursday. Many government agencies, non-profit organizations and public service accounts around the world stopped being verified.
This makes us fear that Twitter will lose its status as a platform for accurate and up-to-date information from authentic sources, even in emergency situations. But the CEO, meanwhile, makes joke decisions like the Dogecoin logo.
While Twitter offers gold verifications to “verified organizations” and gray ones to government organizations and their affiliates, it’s unclear how the platform doles them out, and on Thursday they were not seen on many previously verified agency and utility accounts.
Less than 5% of legacy verified accounts appear to have paid to join Twitter Blue as of Thursday, according to an analysis by Travis Brown, a software developer.
Some of the links added in the article are part of affiliate campaigns and may represent benefits for Softonic.
