Twitter removes legacy blue checkmarks from users

After weeks of uncertainty, Billionaire Elon Musk made good on his threats to remove blue checkmarks from the accounts of verified Twitter users on Thursday.

From former President Donald J. Trump to celebrities LeBron James and William Shatner, users who didn’t pay up to retain the blue badge lost them.

The costs of keeping the marks range from $8 a month for individual web users to a starting price of $1,000 monthly to verify an organization, plus $50 monthly for each affiliate or employee account.

Twitter does not verify the individual accounts to ensure they are who they say they are, as was the case with the previous blue check doled out during the platform’s pre-Musk administration.

Twitter had about 300,000 verified users under the original blue-check system — many of them journalists, athletes and public figures. The checks began disappearing from these users’ profiles late morning Pacific Time.

Converting what was once a signal of authenticity into a revenue stream has caused confusion, made worse by several false starts. When CEO Musk first made it possible for users to buy a blue checkmark, fake accounts purporting to belong to former President George W. Bush and Ely Lilly sprang up.

Adding to the complexity in November, Musk created a multicolored system with various checkmarks for different entities.

The demise of the blue checkmark

After buying Twitter for $44 billion in October, Musk has been trying to boost the struggling platform’s revenue by pushing more people to pay for a premium subscription. But his move also reflects his assertion that the blue verification marks have become an undeserved or “corrupt” status symbol for elite personalities, news reporters and others granted verification for free by Twitter’s previous leadership.

Twitter began tagging profiles with a blue checkmark starting about 14 years ago. Along with shielding celebrities from impersonators, one of the main reasons was to provide an extra tool to curb misinformation coming from accounts impersonating people. Most “legacy blue checks,” including the accounts of politicians, activists and people who suddenly find themselves in the news, as well as little-known journalists at small publications around the globe, are not household names.