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Twitter announced last month that users would have to sign up for a paid monthly subscription by Apr. 1 or face losing their blue or gold check marks, which prove their verified status.

On April 1st, we will begin winding down our legacy verified program and removing legacy verified checkmarks. To keep your blue checkmark on Twitter, individuals can sign up for Twitter Blue here: https://t.co/gzpCcwOpLp

Organizations can sign up for https://t.co/RlN5BbuGA3…

— Twitter Verified (@verified) March 23, 2023

The paid subscription called "Twitter Blue", rolled out in November 2022, was an alternative to the legacy verification system where Twitter vets and hands out check marks to profiles they deem authentic.

Instead, anyone could pay a monthly fee to be deemed "verified".

Individuals will have to pay a monthly subscription of USD$8 (S$10.67) for their blue ticks, and organisations have to pay USD$1,000 (S$1,334) monthly for their gold ticks.

April Fool's?

However, as the deadline, coincidentally on the same day as April Fool's day, had passed with no reports of people losing their blue ticks, people guessed it might have been an April Fool's joke.

That is until people noticed the gold tick for New York Times' (NYT) profile went missing.

Before the deadline, New York Times told BuzzFeed News that they are not planning to pay the monthly fee and will not reimburse reporters for their individual subscriptions.

Only New York Times lost its mark

Even though other major news outlets like Washington Post and Los Angeles Times had said they are not subscribing, their Twitter accounts still have their check marks intact.

Fox News pointed out that Twitter's billionaire owner Elon Musk has frequently attacked NYT as fake news or propaganda, and NYT had also criticised Musk after his takeover of Twitter through an article in May last year.

Twitter and Musk have been silent on whether they will continue with the plan, with some media outlets guessing it would take time to implement it.

Elon musk: Pay for power

Musk had long been critical of the legacy verification system, calling it a "lords & peasants system".

He felt it would hand back "power to the people" if everyone could pay for the blue check mark.

Twitter’s current lords & peasants system for who has or doesn’t have a blue checkmark is bullshit.

Power to the people! Blue for $8/month.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 1, 2022

Musk also argued that the subscription model could "destroy the bots" as a paid account will be suspended if it engages in spam or scams, which increases the cost of running one.

Critics have pointed out that this meant anyone could pay a fee to be "verified" or impersonate others, thereby making the system redundant.

The rollout of Twitter Blue last November met with a surge in impersonations on the site and caused the company to suspend it.

The take-up rate is also reported to be underwhelming. Digital and mobile analytics company Sensor Tower told Techcrunch that Twitter Blue only has around 385,000 out of the 238 million monetisable daily web and active mobile users it said it had in 2022.

Plans for more features through Twitter Blue

While having a verified check mark is not much different from being a normal user, Elon Musk has plans to change that.

He announced that Twitter would only feed Twitter Blue accounts' tweets to the "For You" tab, but retracted the announcement after backlash from many users.

Starting April 15th, only verified accounts will be eligible to be in For You recommendations.

The is the only realistic way to address advanced AI bot swarms taking over. It is otherwise a hopeless losing battle.

Voting in polls will require verification for same reason.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 27, 2023

Twitter uses an algorithm to curate and feed popular tweets to users, regardless of whether they are account followers.

With Musk's proposal, if an account does not pay for the subscription, its followers will only see its tweets.

The new policy that Twitter went ahead with was also removing the information that differentiated between legacy verified accounts and Twitter Blue subscribers, with users told when clicking the tick that the account is “verified because it’s subscribed to Twitter Blue or is a legacy verified account.”

The Guardian reported that users who subscribed to the service sometimes found themselves ridiculed on the platform for paying for the account.

Twitter was reportedly also mulling an option for subscribers to hide their verified badges.

Some celebrities and other public figures have come out to state that they are not paying for Twitter Blue, despite the presence of the verified checkmark.

Please note that I am not paying for the blue checkmark, which I've displayed for many years.

— Ian McKellen (@IanMcKellen) April 2, 2023

Top image via Elon Musk & Twitter