Now Reading: Twitter Purges Blue Verification Badges from Unsubscribed Accounts

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Twitter Purges Blue Verification Badges from Unsubscribed Accounts

svgApril 20, 2023Techshaz

The CEO had been promising to de-verify individuals who were not subscribed to Twitter Blue for several months. It seems that he has now fulfilled this promise.

Twitter has been a platform for users to engage with people from all walks of life for over a decade. For some, it has been a place to connect with friends and family, while for others, it has been a platform for business networking and marketing. But Twitter has also been a space for users to establish their online identities and build their brands. And one way Twitter helps users do this is by giving them the coveted blue checkmark, also known as a verification badge.

Last November, shortly after acquiring Twitter in a $44 billion deal, Musk started criticizing the platform’s verification system. This system was launched in 2009 after complaints from celebrities about unauthorized impersonator accounts. In his efforts to promote the benefits of Twitter Blue’s premium experience, which offers a blue checkmark to subscribers for $8 a month, he consistently denounced the original verification process as “corrupt”. He pledged to remove these verified badges in the coming months.

The Saga of Legacy Blue Check?

Despite setting a deadline for April 1st, Twitter did not remove unpaid verification badges from its app. Elon Musk later announced that these badges would be removed on April 20th. However, many users were skeptical because the process of manually deleting the old blue badges in bulk is unreliable and complicated. Although Twitter had already introduced gold and gray checkmarks for official business and government accounts, strange glitches occurred as blue badges started disappearing on Thursday. Some badges flickered on and off while others temporarily displayed the pre-Twitter Blue caption indicating that the account was notable in government, news, entertainment, or another designated category. Musk had modified this caption to state that legacy blue checkmark holders “may or may not be notable.” Eventually, the legacy badges became indistinguishable from the paid ones.

As promised, on April 20th, Twitter began removing blue verification badges from accounts that were not subscribed to Twitter Blue. This move affected many high-profile individuals, including mega-celebrities like Kim Kardashian and even Pope Francis, as well as journalists who had traditionally been verified through their workplaces. The removal of the badges also meant that readers could no longer trust these Twitter feeds as legitimate news sources. Elon Musk, the CEO of Twitter, had been critical of the verification system and had repeatedly claimed that it was “corrupt.” He had specifically targeted media companies and made an example of The New York Times by revoking their verification badge in early April after they refused to pay for Twitter Blue. The removal of the blue badges has caused some controversy and raised questions about the importance of verification on social media platforms.

Some more notable celebrities who lost their verified checks
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    Twitter Purges Blue Verification Badges from Unsubscribed Accounts