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Blue ticks will change on Twitter – again.
Twitter tweeted on Friday that it will finally do what new owner Elon Musk has been saying for months – remove the little blue ticks once used to denote notable accounts whose identities have been verified unless they are Users pay $8 per month.
The company said the change would roll out on April 1, leading some to speculate it could also be an elaborate April Fool’s joke.
Still, some users reported that they saw a pop-up when logging into Twitter warning them to subscribe to Twitter Blue to avoid losing their tick.
Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Shortly after acquiring the company for $44 billion last October, Musk said he would add payment for a blue tick to an already existing paid version of Twitter — a verification once required of celebrities, authors, journalists, CEOs and others was reserved, which Twitter had checked.
Elon Musk’s first major Twitter product has been paused after fake accounts proliferated
Experts have raised concerns that Musk’s new blue tick plan could create confusion in the app about whether accounts have truly verified their identities.
Musk tweeted Friday that “every individual who is connected to a verified organization has their Twitter account automatically verified.” According to the Post, organizations can verify their accounts for $1,000 a month. twitters information page via verified organizations suggests it costs $50 for affiliated organizations to also get a tick.
Twitter’s new paid tick system separates different accounts with different colors — organizations get a gold tick, individuals get a blue tick, and governments get a gray tick.
The initial launch of Musk’s new paid blue tick prompted imitations from major brands and celebrities. Twitter quickly reset the new Twitter Blue and didn’t relaunch it for a month. After that, it said accounts would be “manually authenticated” before being given a tick.
Twitter said it fixed the “verification”. So I posed as a senator (again).
Twitter has been in a state of upheaval since Musk took over the company and cut thousands of jobs. The billionaire has more than 130 million followers on Twitter and uses the platform to make company announcements and express his opinions on politics, freedom of speech and memes.
The site has suffered several outages since Musk acquired it, in some cases when minor changes to Twitter’s code appeared to break the site. Earlier this month, thousands of users were unable to access links and photos on the site.
“The code stack is extremely brittle for no good reason,” Musk tweeted at the time. “Will eventually have to be completely rewritten.”
Musk’s leadership was met with ire by some who feared rising hate speech on the site and a lack of safety guardrails, especially after layoffs and departures left Twitter with a skeletal Trust and Safety team. But others have praised Musk’s stated commitment to allowing more “free speech” on the site.
Musk has committed to making public Twitter’s decision-making process about what content to boost. He has argued that accounts involved in hateful tweets don’t have the visibility of others, even if their content remains on the site, and is enacting a policy he calls “freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach.”
He tweeted last week that Twitter would “open up” all software code it uses to recommend tweets on March 31, a day before Twitter announced it would be stripping non-paying users of their blue ticks.
He expects there will be hiccups in the short term given the many changes.
“People will discover many stupid things, but we fix problems as soon as they are found!” Musk wrote. “Providing code transparency will be incredibly awkward at first, but it should result in a rapid improvement in recommendation quality. Above all, we hope to gain your trust.”
Faiz Siddiqui contributed to this report.