Formerly Verified Twitter Users Rush to Tweet They’re All Fine After Elon Takes Away Their Blue Checks
Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via AP
The long-anticipated day is finally here for legacy verified Twitter accounts to lose their blue checks if they refused to sign up for the paid Twitter Blue subscription, and predictably, everyone is tweeting about it.
Self-declared “Chief Twit” Elon Musk has been engaged in various efforts to encourage more users to sign up for Twitter Blue to varying degrees of success, and announced earlier this year that non-subscribing legacy verified accounts would lose their check marks. Musk originally set the date for April 1, April Fool’s Day, but then shifted that to 4/20 — another date with obvious appeal to the prankster tendencies of the same guy who changed Twitter’s communications email to auto-respond with a poop emoji.
As a previous possessor of one of those legacy verified accounts, your friendly neighborhood Mediaite contributing editor will admit I was happy to have earned it several years ago for two reasons: it indicated I’d reached a level of recognition in the field of journalism and it made it tougher for anyone to impersonate me. But I survived without it before, and I’ll survive without it now, perhaps better than most due to my unique name.
Thursday afternoon has seen a veritable deluge of tweets from my fellow former blue-checkers insisting we’re fine. Maybe we are all fine. Maybe some are upset and sad about it, but so far there doesn’t seem to be much sign it’s driving a surge of new Twitter Blue subscribers. Time will tell.
Here’s a selection of some of the tweets, including some of my fellow Mediaiters. We’ll let our readers judge for yourselves if the blue-checkers doth protest too much.
https://twitter.com/davidmweissman/status/1648858834134265861?s=20
Amid the objections to Elon, some mockery in those tweets was directed at other blue checks, for sure.
Several Twitter users who had signed up for Twitter Blue also posted their own protestations, telling their followers know they were paying so they could post longer videos.
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