Twitter has announced that it will begin removing the “Verified” checkmarks from high-profile users and organizations starting on April 1st. This comes after Elon Musk threatened to remove the “legacy” checkmarks that confirmed the identities of notable users, such as government officials, corporations, journalists, and celebrities.
Twitter has announced that it will begin winding down its legacy verified program on April 1st and will remove legacy verified checkmarks. However, the caveat is that this announcement came on April Fool’s Day, and Musk is known for April 1st trolling. In 2018, he falsely tweeted that his electric vehicle company Tesla (TSLA) had gone bankrupt. So, this move by Twitter may be an elaborate joke.
The company suggests that individuals can keep their blue checkmark on Twitter if they sign up for Twitter Blue, a subscription service that Musk relaunched in late 2022. Twitter Blue offers powerful features such as undoing a tweet and saving bookmarks to folders, and it costs individuals $84 a year or $8 a month.
This move is seen as a way for Musk to show his disdain for government agencies, journalists, and others while also providing additional revenue to Twitter. Twitter currently collects virtually all of its revenue from advertisers, who have been leaving the platform since Musk took over.
Building a replacement for the legacy verification program has proved to be difficult. The Twitter Blue program was launched in the pre-Musk days of 2021 as a subscription service that provided power features to paying users. Musk then relaunched the program in November 2022, including a blue checkmark in the features for paying users.
The program was then flooded with users who paid for counterfeit accounts pretending to be high-profile individuals such as former President Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, LeBron James, and Nintendo. These counterfeit accounts tweeted false information, such as the LeBron James account claiming that the athlete had requested a trade.
Musk pulled the Twitter Blue program for a few weeks and relaunched it in December with additional steps for reviewing and approving subscribers. Beyond the checkmark, Blue also allows paying users to edit a tweet up to five times within 30 minutes, create tweets up to 4,000 characters long, and post HD videos. The company says Twitter Blue users will see 50% fewer ads in their home timelines, and their tweets will be prioritized among replies, mentions, and searches.
For companies and other organizations, Twitter Blue costs $1,000 a month for the main account and $50 a month for each additional related account. It remains to be seen whether Twitter’s announcement to wind down its legacy verified program on April 1st is a joke or not.
But it’s clear that Twitter is seeking to provide new revenue streams and trying to balance the need for verification with the risk of fraudulent accounts.
