It’s finally happening. Twitter users bid farewell to blue checkmarks

Source: The Hill | April 20, 2023 | Jeremy Tanner

(NEXSTAR) – After weeks of uncertainty, Elon Musk made good on his threats to remove blue checkmarks from the accounts of verified 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.

On Thursday, some mourned the loss of their checkmark while others poked fun at its demise.

“It can be spelled both ‘checkmark’ and ‘check mark,’ not that it really matters anymore,” Dictionary.com tweeted.

The first evidence of checkmark-related confusion started to emerge as well, with a check-less @nycgov tweeting, “This is an authentic Twitter account representing the New York City Government,” to which @NYCG0VERNMENT replied, “No, you’re not. THIS account is the only authentic Twitter account representing and run by the New York City Government.”

Other organizations, such as the Washington State Department of Natural Resources recommended visitors go to its website and click the Twitter icon at the bottom of the page to reach the verified government Twitter account.

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