Originally, Twitter announced that it would be retiring its ‘Legacy’ blue checkmarks on April 1, Chief Twit Elon Musk recently announced that he’s pushing that date to April 20th, which continues his long history of referencing 4/20 in his public actions. Guess you can say that Musk is fond of ‘Blazing It’. For some reason, Musk finds it rather hilarious to constantly reference the De-facto holiday for Cannabis culture, although his ex-partner Grimes says that he only found out about the pop-culture term around a few years back.
Retiring on The Marriage of Juana
Whatever his reason, 4/20 is now the new D-day for legacy blue ticks, which Twitter says will address corruption and inequity within its previous verification system. However, this renewed push seems likely driven by spite, with Musk taking no small amount of joy in removing the tick from accounts that he doesn’t like, particularly publishers that he considers biased or overtly against him.
True enough, among the few accounts that actually did have their blue checkmark removed on April 1st was The New York Times, which Musk has affectionately labeled as ‘propaganda’. Musk has also described removing checkmarks from legacy accounts as ‘glorious’, though the corruption and systemic failures in the old checkmark approval process don’t seem anywhere near as problematic as Musk suggests.
At the same time, the move will also help negate the perceived value that Musk is trying to sell with his new $8 verification package. The idea, as Musk puts it, is that regular users can be like celebrities by getting their own blue tick, which has long been a status symbol of sorts in the app. Before, it was an exclusive offer, but now, anyone can literally just buy one, making it more of a ‘normal’ thing, as opposed to what it originally was meant to be.
Worth noting, too, that there actually isn’t any verification involved, with Twitter relying only on ‘payment verification’ – i.e a user’s capacity to pay – as a qualifier for its new blue tick. Musk views that this will serve as a means to highlight real people in the app, but it’s a fundamental change in what the checkmark represents, which, again, is unlikely to hold the same level of status.
That’s at least somewhat reflected in the take-up numbers for Twitter Blue thus far. At the most recent count, Twitter now has around 600k paying subscribers, which is about 0.24% of its total user base. Only 4.3% of legacy checkmark holders have signed up following Musk’s initial removal threat, so it’s unlikely that we’ll see a big influx of Blue subscribers.
The Wrap
Regardless, Twitter’s pushing through with the change, while from the next week, it’ll also be implementing its new algorithmic push, with the only Tweets appearing in its ‘For You’ Feed recommendations coming from paying subscribers, adding another incentive to the program. However, it’s suspected that that won’t be much of a difference-maker either way. It sounds like an overall net negative, but, again, perhaps Musk knows something that everybody else doesn’t. Maybe Blue take-up will rise as a result, with the most active accounts keen to maximize their Tweet reach. We’ll all find out soon enough.
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