SAN FRANCISCO – Twitter users anticipated a reckoning over the weekend, as check marks denoting the accounts of celebrities, politicians and other notable figures and organizations were removed en masse.
That reckoning did not come.
While Twitter removed the verification mark from some accounts, including The New York Times, most verified users retained the symbols, which were long seen as conferring special status and showing the identity of those behind it. of the accounts had been confirmed by the social networking service. Jokes by users trying to exploit the change by impersonating a celebrity or other public figure were muted, with only a few hoaxes being spread on the platform.
Instead, the most prominent change on Twitter occurred on Monday, when the platform’s blue bird icon was replaced on some accounts with a doge, a popular online icon of a Shiba Inu dog that has become synonymous with Dogecoin. a type of cryptocurrency. After the change of the Twitter logo, the price of the digital currency shot up more than 30 percent.
The inaction around the checkmarks showed that “Twitter has a real credibility crisis,” said Graham Brookie, director of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Laboratory, which studies online disinformation. “When they say they’re going to do something right now, they haven’t shown that they’re doing it consistently.”
The changes to the check mark program are part of moves made by Elon Musk, who bought Twitter in October for $44 billion. Last year, he said Twitter would start removing checkmarks from users’ profiles unless they paid an $8 monthly fee for Twitter Blue, a subscription service that includes the blue and white checkmark on user profiles. the users.
Musk did not respond to a request for comment.
Previously, Twitter had given the badges to celebrities, politicians, and other notable organizations or individuals for free as a way to distinguish their accounts from those seeking to imitate them and to show that their identities had been confirmed. That helped Twitter because public figures generated “a disproportionate amount of engagement” on the service and celebrities and politicians could post freely without fear of being impersonated, said Lara Cohen, Twitter’s former global director of marketing and partners.
Inside Elon Musk’s Twitter
- FTC Investigation: Elon Musk tried to engage with the Federal Trade Commission as the agency stepped up an investigation into Twitter’s data and privacy practices, the documents show, but was rebuffed.
- Source code leak: Parts of the underlying computer code that Twitter runs on have been leaked online, a rare and major exposure of intellectual property.
- Decrease in value: Musk said Twitter is now worth around $20 billion, according to an email he sent to employees, a significant drop from the $44 billion he paid to buy the company in October.
But after Musk, who has said he is an advocate of free speech, announced the change to Twitter’s verification program last year, a wave of phishing broke out. In November, a user who had paid for a check mark via Twitter Blue posed as the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly and tweeted that it would provide free insulin to customers. The message sent Eli Lilly shares tumbling. Other brands faced similar hoaxes, forcing Twitter to pause subscriptions to Twitter Blue.
Last month, Twitter Announced would start removing checkmarks on April 1 for those who weren’t paying for the symbols. In addition to individual users paying $8 a month, Twitter planned to charge organizations $1,000 a month for verification that came with a gold checkmark, with several exceptions, according to internal documents seen by The Times.
On Friday, some verified users began to preemptively mourn the loss of their special status by tweeting about their final moments with a check mark and posting pictures of their profiles with their badges. Others revamped their profiles to impersonate author JK Rowling, NASA, and other famous figures and organizations.
Some said they would not pay for something they had received for free for a long time. nba star Lebron James He said in a tweet last week that his check mark would soon disappear and that “if you know me, I won’t pay.”
News organizations including The Times, The Washington Post and Politico also said they would not pay for check marks, with some saying the symbol no longer displayed credibility or authenticity because anyone could buy it.
Others argued that the change would level the playing field by allowing anyone who wanted a badge to earn one.
“Twitter only verified elites and friends of Twitter employees was wrong,” Tim Sweeney, Epic Games CEO, said in a statement. cheep on Sunday. “Democratizing verification for $8 was good. Treating everyone equally is a principle.”
Over the weekend, however, nearly all verified users kept their credentials, raising questions about whether Musk would follow through or was pulling an April Fool’s Day prank.
On Saturday night, in response to a Twitter user who pointed out that The Times had said it would not pay for verification, Musk tweeted which would remove the news organization check mark from your account. Within an hour, The Times’ gold verification badge was gone.
Musk said in a cheep on Sunday that it was “hypocritical” for The Times to refuse to pay for verification while running a subscription business of its own.
A spokesperson for The Times declined to comment on Musk’s tweets.
On Monday, some users began seeing a bulldog instead of Twitter’s traditional bird logo. The doge’s image fit in with Mr. Musk’s own dealings with Dogecoin, which he previously tweeted in support of. On Friday, lawyers representing Musk had asked a judge to throw out a multimillion-dollar racketeering lawsuit that accused the billionaire and Tesla, his electric car company, of manipulating the price of cryptocurrency with their tweets.
Susan Beachy contributed research.
