As April Fool’s Day came and passed, the blue check marks on Twitter remained for legacy verified accounts and Elon Musk was yet to remove them and make those users pay $8 (Rs 900 a month in India) to remain verified.
Almost all legacy Blue check marks were intact on Monday, two days after the Musk deadline.
A new verified tagline for legacy Blue users now reads: “This account is verified because it is subscribed to Twitter Blue or is a legacy verified account”.
Twitter’s CEO on Sunday said that verification of accounts will help a lot.
“We are adding the date of verification to the profile. Note, only date since paid verification counts, since there was so much corruption in the past with legacy checkmarks,” he tweeted.
Musk has removed just one blue badge – that for the account of the New York Times which posted that it will not pay $8 for the verified Blue service with verification.
“Oh ok, we’ll take it off then,” the Twitter CEO posted.
However, Twitter can still remove legacy Blue check marks (unless it was indeed an April Fool’s Day prank).
According to Musk, only verified accounts will be allowed to appear in ‘For You recommendations’, starting April 15.
“Starting April 15, only verified accounts will be eligible to be in For You recommendations. This 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 the same reason, he said last week.
“That said, it’s ok to have verified bot accounts if they follow terms of service and don’t impersonate a human,” Musk added.
Meanwhile, a report recently revealed that half of Blue service subscribers have less than 1,000 followers on the platform.
Twitter is also reportedly planning to give a $1,000 checkmark free to the top 10,000 organizations by follower count.
