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The blue check has long been a stamp of authenticity on Twitter. The check, which appears next to a user’s name, verifies the identity of people or organizations deemed notable in some way — an important concern on a site where mimic accounts run rampant.
Now, that blue check, which previously was part of a case-by-case verification system at Twitter, will be given to anyone who will pay $8 a month. And as of tomorrow, “legacy” blue checks will disappear. Here are three things to know about the changes.
1. Blue checks no longer denote a degree of trustworthiness. That’s important to keep in mind if you’re one of the many people who use Twitter to access information from government agencies and politicians — especially in issues around health and safety, in the wake of mass shootings, after natural disasters or during emergencies like covid.
2. There are still ways to vet accounts, though. Many government sites, for example, link to their Twitter handles on their actual websites. It’s always worth looking not just at the Twitter name but the Twitter handle (the thing that comes after the “@”) to look for common tactics like using a “0” instead of an “o” or other slight misspellings that could be a tell for a copycat account.
3. The blue check remake will shift the Twitter user experience. Twitter CEO Elon Musk recently said that only verified accounts will show up in Twitter’s “For You” feed. Is that information what you want or true? Those seem to be secondary concerns. As Imo Udom, senior vice president of innovation ecosystems at Mozilla, told me recently, “It’s hard to be the ‘town square’ if you keep charging everyone a fee to enter it.”
— Tech Reporter Benjamin Powers
(Photo by Mariia Shalabaieva/Unsplash)
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