Twitter Blue Ticks Remain Despite Verification Confusion

Despite Twitter's promises to remove legacy blue checkmarks from its platform on April 1, the social media platform has been unable to do so.

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In addition to that, the company, led by billionaire Elon Musk, has also been able to confuse many people by making older verified users indistinguishable from those who have paid the fee for the verification.

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This comes after Mr. Musk said last month that legacy verified Twitter users would see their blue ticks removed from the service if they failed to pay a subscription fee of 8 US dollars (£6.40) a month to its Twitter Blue subscription service.

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There will be a monthly fee of 1,000 dollars (£810) for organizations who wish to receive a gold verification tick on their account.

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This resulted in thousands of high-profile users of the platform being braced to lose their ticks, which are useful in verifying the identity of users and enabling users to be distinguished from imposters.

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The legacy blue ticks have remained in place even though they were expected to be removed on April 1.

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As a result, Twitter has removed the blue tick from the main account of the New York Times, an organization that has offended Mr. Musk in particular with its journalism. It has been stated by the newspaper that it will not pay for the verification process.

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"At this time, we are not planning on paying the monthly fee for checkmark status for our institutional Twitter accounts," the publication said in a statement on Sunday.

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"We also won't be able to reimburse reporters for the use of Twitter Blue on personal accounts, except in rare cases when this status is necessary for reporting purposes."

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Mr. Musk responded by saying he would therefore remove the checkmark as a result.

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It was reported last week that efforts to remove legacy blue ticks could take a long time because there is a significant amount of manual work involved in the process.

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On the other hand, the platform has also made it more difficult to distinguish between those checkmarks that are legacy and those that are paid for by advertisers.

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Some legacy-verified Twitter accounts now have a description that reads: "This account is verified because it has subscribed to Twitter Blue or because it is a legacy-verified account."

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Before, these accounts used to display messages that said: "This is a verified legacy account. It may or may not be notable."