Twitter has started removing blue checks from non-paying users.

Several high-profile Twitter users are losing the blue checks that help verify their identities and separate them from pretenders on the Elon Musk-owned social media platform.

After several false starts, Twitter on Thursday started making good on its promise to remove blue checks from accounts that don’t pay a monthly fee to keep them. Twitter had about 300,000 verified users under its original blue-check system – many of them journalists, athletes and public figures. The checks — which meant the account was verified by Twitter based on who it says — began disappearing from these users’ profiles late in the morning Pacific Time.

High-profile users who lost their blue checks on Thursday included Beyoncé, Pope Francis, Oprah Winfrey and former President Donald Trump.

The cost of marking ranges from $8 per month for individual web users to a starting price of $1,000 per month to verify an organization, plus $50 per month for each affiliate or employee account. Twitter does not verify individual accounts, as was the case with previous BlueChecks during the pre-Musk administration of the platform.

Celebrity users, from basketball star LeBron James to author Stephen King and Star Trek’s William Shatner, shied away from joining — though on Thursday, all three had blue checks indicating the account paid for verification. Is. It was not immediately clear whether that was the case or whether Twitter had made an exception for them.

Raja for one said he didn’t pay.

“My Twitter account says I subscribed to Twitter Blue. I haven’t. My Twitter account says I’ve given a phone number. I haven’t,” King tweeted on Thursday. “Just so you know.”

Singer Dionne Warwick tweeted earlier in the week that the site’s verification system was “an absolute mess.”

“The way Twitter is going, it could be anybody now,” Warwick said.

On Thursday, Warwick lost his blue check (which is actually a white check mark on a blue background).

For users who still had Blue Check Thursday, a popup message indicated that the account “is verified because they are subscribed to Twitter Blue and have verified their phone number.” that they have access to it — it does not verify the identity of the person.

Fewer than 5% of legacy verified accounts have paid to join Twitter Blue, according to an analysis by Travis Browne, a Berlin-based developer of software for tracking social media.

Musk’s move has upset some high-profile users and pleased some right-wing figures and Musk fans who thought the points were unfair. But it hasn’t been an obvious money maker for the social media platform that has long relied on advertising for most of its revenue.

Digital intelligence platform SimilarWeb analyzed how many people signed up for Twitter Blue on their desktop computers and found just 116,000 confirmed sign-ups last month, which doesn’t represent a major revenue stream at $8 or $11 a month . Accounts purchased through mobile apps were not counted in the analysis.

After buying Twitter for $44 billion in October, Musk has been trying to boost the struggling platform’s revenue by getting more people to pay for premium subscriptions. But his move also reflects his claim that the blue verification mark has become an ineligible or “corrupt” status symbol for celebrities, news reporters and others who were given free verification by Twitter’s previous leadership.

Twitter started tagging profiles with a blue check mark about 14 years ago. One of the main reasons was to provide an additional tool to prevent misinformation coming from accounts impersonating people, along with protecting celebrities from impersonators. Most “legacy blue checks”, including accounts of politicians, activists and people who suddenly find themselves in the news, as well as little-known journalists in smaller publications around the world, are not household names.

One of Musk’s first products after taking over Twitter was to launch a service that provided blue checks to anyone willing to pay $8 a month. But it was quickly flooded with impostor accounts, including those impersonating Nintendo, pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly and Musk’s businesses Tesla and SpaceX, so Twitter had to temporarily suspend the service a few days after its launch.

The relaunched service costs $8 per month for web users and $11 per month for users of its iPhone or Android apps. Members are expected to see fewer ads, post longer videos, and have their Tweets featured more prominently.