As April Fool’s Day came, the blue check marks on Twitter remained for legacy verified accounts, and Elon Musk had failed to remove them and charge those users $8 to stay verified.
On Monday, two days beyond Musk’s deadline, almost all the Blue check marks remained intact.
For legacy Blue users, a new verified tagline now reads: “This account is verified because it is subscribed to Twitter Blue or is a legacy verified account.”
On Sunday, Twitter CEO stated that account verification will be really beneficial.
“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 only deleted one blue badge: that for the New York Times account, which stated 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.
Twitter, on the other hand, can still delete historical Blue check marks (unless it was an April Fool’s Day hoax).
On April 15, only verified accounts will be able to appear in ‘For You recommendations,’ according to Musk.
“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.
Yet, according to a recent survey, half of Blue service members have fewer than 1,000 followers on the site.
Twitter is also rumoured to be considering a $1,000 checkmark giveaway to the top 10,000 organisations based on follower count.
