After removing the blue badge for all users who did not subscribe to Twitter Blue, the microblogging site is now returning the badge to users with more than 1 million followers.
Posted Date – Sun, 23 Apr 23 at 04:37pm
Hyderabad: After removing the blue ticks for all users who did not subscribe to Twitter Blue, the microblogging site is now returning those verification ticks to users with over a million followers. The move marked a change from owner Elon Musk’s original plans.
When the Tesla CEO bought Twitter for a whopping $44 billion, some thought the acquisition would put him out of business. But little did they know that a few months later Musk would stop at nothing to get that money back.
After replacing more than half of Twitter’s staff, he’s now taking advantage of the microblogging platform’s services.
For the uninitiated, Twitter has a subscription plan called Twitter Blue that will offer the best features of the platform. You pay a fee and get the privilege, like most OTT platforms.
Now what Twitter has recently started doing is removing key perks like two-factor authentication for non-subscribers. While it’s billed as a security-related initiative, it’s actually meant to encourage people to subscribe.
Likewise, all users who had legacy verification blue ticks and those who did not subscribe lost their blue ticks overnight. These include important official pages, celebrities, politicians and others.
On Sunday, some of those users started getting their blue ticks back. While there were reports that users with over a million followers had their blue ticks withdrawn, the blue ticks themselves proved otherwise.
Here is the text you see when you click on the blue tick that has been restored. “This account has been verified because they subscribed to Twitter Blue and verified their phone number.”
While it may be credible that these users actually paid for their subscriptions, many claim they did not. “Apparently I paid for Twitter Blue and gave them a phone number to verify, but I didn’t. Mr. Musk, are you paying me too?” wrote politician Omar Abdullah.
So, is the blue tick returned to those users with more than one million users? Yes. But have they paid for it, as Musk has always hoped? Some claimed they hadn’t, but Twitter said they’d all paid for it.
