Mint Explainer: How Twitter’s blue tick became a laughing stock

The latest in an increasingly long line of gaffes came on April 20, when Twitter stripped formerly verified users of their blue checkmarks, as Musk had promised, only to have accounts with more than a million followers a few days later for unspecified reasons. To restore badges. To describe Musk’s management style as seat-of-the-pants would be a huge understatement.

Brief History of the Blue Tick

To understand the strange journey of Twitter’s Blue Tick, we have to go back to 2009. Believe it or not, the reason Twitter introduced the verification badge is because a Hall of Fame baseball player was impersonated on the platform. Tony La Russa sued Twitter after an account mocked his two arrests for drunk driving. The platform quickly began verifying celebrities to thwart copycats and avoid any further lawsuits. Soon after, it began verifying organizations and – to combat the growing problem of fake news – journalists.

But Twitter’s method of awarding blue checks was opaque and somewhat arbitrary — it never specified the criteria for receiving the checks. Some anonymous accounts with large followings and usually posting humorous content were also verified. Despite this, the blue check soon became a status symbol.

Musk monetizes Checkmark

When Musk took over at Twitter, he promised to democratize the platform’s verification system by letting anyone blue tick — for a price — and making it part of the company’s premium offering, Twitter Blue.

In addition to receiving blue ticks, Twitter Blue users can post tweets longer than 280 characters and high-resolution videos longer than 60 seconds, edit tweets, and see fewer ads. They also gained prominence in replies and in the new ‘For You’ tab, which now featured a mishmash of popular and tweets meant to improve engagement on the platform.

Twitter also introduced a gold checkmark for charging organizations 82,300 ($1,000) a month for the main account and 4,120 ($50) per month for each affiliate account.

Obviously, this caused a lot of confusion, as many impersonator accounts quickly signed up for Twitter Blue to get the blue tick and pretend they were the real thing. Pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly lost $15 billion in market cap when a fake but verified impersonator account tweeted “insulin is now free”. 70% and cap it at $25 per vial.) It was only then that Twitter began actually verifying the identities of accounts that signed up for Twitter Blue.

blue-tick bullying

An unintended consequence of the monetization of blue ticks was that Twitter Blue subscribers were labeled as such, whereas previously verified users’ badges were described as ‘legacy’ verifications. With one click of a user’s blue tick you can see if they were one of the old elite or – god forbid – paid for a blue tick. Twitter stopped labeling legacy verified accounts and Twitter Blue accounts differently when the latter group began to be ridiculed and even harassed.

But users quickly learned that they could still find out whether an account was ‘legacy verified’ by checking whether it was followed by @verified. Twitter responded with yet another Band-Aid — @verified stopped following nearly 500,000 of its legacy blue-tick accounts.

Musk announced that all legacy verified users would lose their blue ticks on April 1, but this did not happen. Meanwhile, several celebrities and organizations publicly stated that they would not subscribe to Twitter Blue in order to retain their blue ticks. Meanwhile, Musk stripped the main New York Times account (@nytimes) of its blue tick mark, although affiliated accounts such as @nytimesbooks and @nytimesworld continued to enjoy their verified status.

Musk eventually said that accounts with unpaid blue ticks would lose a day associated with marijuana use on April 20. On April 21, nearly all legacy verified accounts lost their blue ticks, including organizations that had not paid for Twitter Blue. Mint’s official handle @livemint also lost its verification badge in the Great Purge.

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However, some accounts mysteriously retain their blue ticks despite not paying for Twitter Blues, including authors Stephen King and Neil Gaiman and basketball player LeBron James. Musk later confirmed in a tweet that he was personally paying Twitter Blue for these accounts, to which King responded that he should instead donate the money to a Ukrainian non-profit.

return of checks

As of April 23, all legacy accounts with over one million followers magically got their blue ticks back. All of these were labeled as having membership in Twitter Blue – a patently false claim.

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Several celebrities said their accounts had been re-verified even though they had not paid for Twitter Blue, attempting to distance themselves from the once-coveted badge. Amid the chaos, Twitter re-verified several accounts of those killed, including Bollywood actor Sushant Singh Rajput and journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

In late December, Musk admitted to making mistakes in the two months since taking over the company. “My error rate in being the lead tweet will go down over time, but in the beginning, we’ll obviously make a lot more mistakes, because I’m new to this… Hey, I just got here, dude,” Musk told All —said on the podcast.

Four months later, it looks like the Twitter CEO’s error rate is only getting worse.