Is Twitter now planning to reinstate its recently-retired legacy verified accounts? How fickle of it if it were to do so, but even that wouldn’t be surprising, at least not at this point.

While that might be a bit of a stretch, Twitter is experimenting with a new way to show an account’s verification history, which would include a new listing of when an account had been verified, signifying whether or not it was legacy verified.

Can You Explain To Me?

As seen in an example posted by app researcher Nima Owji, Twitter’s testing out a new wording for its verification info pop-up, which would include an indicator of when that specific account was verified. Previously, Twitter displayed two versions of this info box, which showed whether an account was either legacy verified or had subscribed to Twitter Blue. With Twitter retiring its blue legacy ticks last month, that explainer was n longer needed and was aptly removed.

Since then, Twitter has also gifted verification to accounts with more than a million followers, meaning that not all of the accounts that currently have a blue tick are necessarily subscribed to Twitter Blue. That could be seen as a false endorsement, and maybe this new approach is a step towards reducing that concern, thus providing more clarity over how exactly each account managed to acquire its checkmark.

If implemented, that would mean that all accounts verified before November 2022, before Elon Musk introduced his new paid verification scheme, would be legacy verified. Meanwhile, all accounts after wouldn’t be. Would that be sufficient, legally, to save Twitter if a celebrity were to file a lawsuit over the false representation that they’ve bought a blue tick? We reckon that it likely won’t – but perhaps Twitter could make an argument that this does provide that clarity, while it would also be a helpful measure for users to understand which accounts can be trusted, based on their previous verification history.

As noted, that could open the door for Twitter to bring back all of its legacy verified ticks. Legacy checkmarks are still active in the app, Twitter’s just hidden them – maybe, this new indicator could give Twitter a means to essentially roll back the removal of legacy blue ticks, and restore a measure of protection and trust in the process. While not all legacy checks were awarded on merit, as Musk has noted, many of the 400k or so blue ticks were given to users based on proper checks and processes and did give users another measure of trust in the app.

The Wrap

Restoring its legacy blue ticks would add more value back to Twitter’s paid checkmark system, which people are trying to buy into – because right now, the only thing the new blue ticks represent is that a person is paying $8 a month to use the app.

If all celebrities and sports stars get their OG ticks back, maybe more users would want to also buy in – while it could also help address problems with blue tick accounts dominating conversations in the app, which may be impacting engagement. Again, it’s probably a stretch to assume that this is where Twitter is headed with this potential update, but it could be another marker that its $8 verification scheme hasn’t delivered as hoped.

Sources

https://bit.ly/3MQTM4d