This time it’s for real. Many of Twitter‘s high-profile users are losing the blue checks that helped verify their identity and distinguish them from impostors on the Elon Musk-owned social media platform.
After several false starts, Twitter began making good on its promise on Thursday to remove the blue checks from accounts that don’t pay a monthly fee to keep them.
Twitter had about 300,000 verified users under the original blue-check system. Many of them are journalists, athletes and public figures. The checks used to mean the account was verified by Twitter. To be who it says it begins disappearing from these users’ profiles late morning Pacific Time.
High-profile users lost their blue checks on Thursday. That included Beyoncé, Pope Francis, Oprah Winfrey and former President Donald Trump.
The costs of keeping the marks range from USD 8 a month for individual web users to a starting price of USD 1,000 monthly to verify an organisation. Plus USD 50 monthly for each affiliate or employee account.
Twitter does not verify the individual accounts, as was the case with the previous blue check doled out during the platform’s pre-Musk administration.
CELEBRITIES WHO LOST LOGO
Celebrity users, from basketball star LeBron James to author Stephen King and Star Trek’s William Shatner, have baulked at joining although on Thursday. All three had blue checks indicating that the account paid for verification.
King, for one, said he hadn’t paid. “My Twitter account says I’ve subscribed to Twitter Blue. I haven’t.
My Twitter account says I’ve given a phone number. I haven’t,” King tweeted Thursday. “Just so you know.”
In a reply to King’s tweet, Musk said. “You’re welcome namaste” and in another tweet, he said he’s “paying for a few personally”.
Singer Dionne Warwick tweeted earlier in the week that the site’s verification system “is an absolute mess.”
“The way Twitter is going anyone could be me now,” Warwick said.
She had earlier vowed not to pay for Twitter Blue, saying the monthly fee “could (and will) be going toward my extra hot lattes.
” On Thursday, Warwick lost her blue check (which is actually a white check mark in a blue background).
Verifying a phone number simply means that the person has a phone number. And they verified that they have access to it. It does not confirm the person’s identity.
It wasn’t just celebrities and journalists who lost their blue checks Thursday.
Many government agencies, nonprofits and public-service accounts around the world found themselves no longer verified. Raising concerns that Twitter could lose its status as a platform for getting accurate, up-to-date information from authentic sources, including in emergencies.
While Twitter offers gold checks for “verified organizations” and gray checks for government organisations and their affiliates. It’’s not clear how the platform doles these out and they were not seen Thursday on many previously verified agency and public service accounts.