Since the billionaire Elon Musk bought it, Twitter is about to remove check marks from verified users who refuse to pay for the platform's subscription service.
Musk said that the change will take place Saturday and will remove the platform's only public indicator of legitimacy. It is an information integrity nightmare, said Jessica Brandt, policy director for the Brookings Institution's artificial intelligence and emerging technology initiative. Blue check marks were intended to be signals of information quality, and putting them up for sale is a pretty quick way to destroy that functionality. Legacy verified accounts, as Musk has called them, have a blue check mark next to their name. In 2009, the check mark was created by Twitter's way of saying that accounts for celebrities, journalists, political figures and brands were not being run by impersonators. The company has struggled with some users perception that a blue check was an endorsement and the implication that users who weren't verified were less important.
The check mark was the subject of some scrutiny over how they were handed out in the following years. Others began to view the check mark as an elitist symbol. Some conservatives started using the term blue check as a way to deride perceived liberals.
Musk has taken a populist view on the issue, calling the verification system one of the lords peasants. Legacy verified accounts can keep their check if they start paying, but many celebrities and influencers have balked at the idea of paying for a service they have long used for free.
As part of the new system, Twitter will allow organizations to pay for verification that they can pass on to their employees. Pricing starts at $1,000 a month. Many of the company's top advertisers and biggest company accounts won't have to pay, The New York Times reported.
Musk said only verified users will show up in Twitter's For You feed, a stream of recommended tweets that is the default for many users.
Users paying for a subscription service is necessary for the company to stay afloat, according to Musk. He bought the company for $44 billion last year, and said it was now worth $20 billion in an email to staff last week. The reporting was not confirmed by NBC News.
In November, Twitter rolled out a system that allowed users to pay for accounts. Paid users changed their profiles to impersonate companies. One imitated drug manufacturer Eli Lily and claimed that insulin is free now causing the drugmaker's stock price to drop. There have been instances where Russian propaganda accounts have successfully paid for blue checkmarks.
There are indications that not many are on the service, and that is why Twitter hasn't released official numbers on how many verified users have paid for the service. Travis Brown, a programmer and former Twitter employee who tracks activity on the site through a grant from Germany's nonprofit Open Knowledge Foundation, has written programming code to track paid accounts. He said fewer than 8,000 legacy accounts had started paying for the service as of Sunday.
It certainly seems like some of the platform's most active and high-profile users aren't planning on signing up, including rapper Ice T, who recently tweeted: F -- that checkmark.