This time it’s for genuine.
Many of Twitter’s prominent users are losing the blue checks that assisted confirm their identity and differentiate them from impostors on the Elon Musk-owned social media platform.
After numerous incorrect begins, Twitter started making great on its pledge Thursday to eliminate the blue checks from accounts that puton’t pay a month-to-month charge to keep them. Twitter had about 300,000 confirmed users under the initial blue-check system — numerous of them reporters, professionalathletes and public figures. The checks — which utilized to mean the account was confirmed by Twitter to be who it states it is — started vanishing from these users’ profiles late earlymorning Pacific Time.
High-profile users who lost their blue checks Thursday consistedof Beyoncé, Pope Francis, Oprah Winfrey and previous President Donald Trump.
The expenses of keeping the marks variety from $8 a month for private web users to a beginning cost of $1,000 regularmonthly to confirm an company, plus $50 month-to-month for each affiliate or worker account. Twitter does not confirm the private accounts, as was the case with the previous blue check doled out throughout the platform’s pre-Musk administration.
Celebrity users, from basketball star LeBron James to author Stephen King and Star Trek’s William Shatner, have balked at signingupwith — although on Thursday, all 3 had blue checks showing that the account paid for confirmation.
King, for one, stated he hadn’t paid.
“My Twitter account states I’ve subscribed to Twitter Blue. I sanctuary’t. My Twitter account states I’ve offered a phone number. I sanctuary’t,” King tweeted Thursday. “Just so you understand.”
In a reply to King’s tweet, Musk stated “You’re welcome namaste” and in another tweet he stated he’s “paying for a coupleof personally.”
Singer Dionne Warwick tweeted earlier in the week that the website’s confirmation system “is an outright mess.”
“The method Twitter is going anybody might be me now,” Warwick stated. She had earlier pledged not to pay for Twitter Blue, stating the month-to-month charge “could (and will) be going towards my additional hot lattes.”
On Thursday, Warwick lost her blue check (which is really a white check mark in a blue background).
For users who still had a blue check Thursday, a popup message showed that the account “is validated since they are subscribed to Twitter Blue and validated their phone number.” Verifying a phone number just implies that the individual has a phone number and they validated that they have gainaccessto to it — it does not validate the individual’s identity.
It wasn’t simply cele