By CT Jones
The merger of the blue ticks comes days after Twitter CEO Elon Musk announced that the company will phase out the “old” verified ticks starting April 1.
Prior to Sunday, when a user clicked a verified user’s blue tick, an information popped up. Those who were verified prior to Twitter Blue’s release featured the words “This account is verified because it is notable in government, news, entertainment, or some other specific category.” Those who paid $8 a month displayed the message, “This account is verified because they subscribed to Twitter Blue.” This immediately led to weeks of ridicule from the internet community.
Now it won’t be that easy to make fun of Twitter Blue subscribers. The new information flags currently read: “This account is verified because it is subscribed to Twitter Blue or is a verified legacy account.” The change, which went into effect on Sunday, has already sparked a new round of jokes, with dozens of high-profile accounts now publicly declaring that they didn’t pay for Twitter Blue.
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While Musk’s tenure as “Chief Twit” has been marked by a number of changes, including adding a tweet’s view count, increasing the character count, and getting rid of free access to the site’s API, verification has remained an issue from the start that is of interest.
Prior to Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, verifiable organizations and individuals such as politicians, journalists, and celebrities were given blue ticks for free to prevent those accounts from being parodied and impersonated. While Musk has repeatedly called the old ticks “nonsensical,” most of the changes he made to combat what he called a “corrupt system” were rolled back almost as quickly as they were introduced.
When Musk launched Twitter Blue in October 2022, subscribers to the $8 subscription program automatically received a blue verification tick. After the program was immediately used to spread misinformation, he introduced double verification, where verified accounts that were suspicious were given an official flag. This went on for three hours before Musk announced in a tweet, “I killed it.”
Jokes aside, there’s an obvious flaw in Musk’s new plan — the new tagging makes it even easier to impersonate someone else on the app. But those with the old blue ticks will have to put up with people thinking they’ve painstakingly saved that $8, at least until Musk changes his mind.
This article is a translation of text from rollingstone.com