Description
Twitter CEO Elon Musk tweeted an update Wednesday morning about the fate of former verified accounts on the platform. Announcing the "deadline" to remove the blue check under Twitter's previous regime, Musk wrote: "Deadline to remove legacy blue checks is 4/20." It's unclear if the actual date for the Legacy Marks Purge refers to April 20 or if Musk is simply inkling the joke around 4/20, widely considered an unofficial day to celebrate cannabis. Also read: Twitter offers free blue ticks for these accounts. Are you eligible?
Earlier, Twitter announced that it would clamp down on the old blue ticks starting April 1, allowing only paid subscribers to access them.
Twitter Blue is priced differently for each region and depending on how you sign up. In the United States, it costs $11 per month or $114.99 per year for iOS or Android users and $8 per month or $84 per year for web users.
On April 2, Twitter changed the language in the description of verified users to read: "This account is verified because they follow Twitter Blue or are a previous verified account." Notably, the American newspaper the New York Times refused to pay the verification fee after losing the coveted badge. Musk later called the media "hypocritical" for asking people to "pay their subscription."
Several celebrities, including NBA star LeBron James and author Stephen King, have made their disapproval of the Twitter Blue service known.
Musk is pushing for paid verification to generate much-needed revenue for the company, calling his original verification rules "corrupt and absurd."
Twitter and its billionaire CEO recently made headlines for a series of updates to the platform. On Tuesday, Musk posted an "X" on his Twitter account, sparking speculation about the future of the company he bought for $44 billion last October. The microblogging platform is apparently no longer an independent company and has now been merged with a newly formed company called X Corp.
Prior to that, Musk had temporarily changed the logo from Twitter's blue web bird to the Shiba Inu mascot of the Dogecoin cryptocurrency meme, allegedly a sarcastic take on a racketeering lawsuit accusing him of intentionally inflating the value of Dogecoin.
