Explained: Are Twitter blue ticks reinstated for users with over one million followers?

After removing blue ticks for all the users who did not subscribe to Twitter Blue, the micro-blogging site is now giving them back to users with over a million followers.

Hyderabad: After removing blue ticks for all the users who did not subscribe to Twitter Blue, the micro-blogging site is now giving back those verification ticks to users with over a million followers. The move is a clear u-turn to owner Elon Musk’s initial plan.

When the Tesla CEO bought Twitter for a whopping $44 billion, some thought it was a purchase that would make him bankrupt. But little did they know, months later Musk will be down to do anything to recover that money.

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After handing the boot to more than half of Twitter’s workforce, he has now moved on to capitalise on the microblogging platform’s service.

For the unversed, Twitter introduced a subscription plan called Twitter Blue which will provide the best of the platform’s features. You pay a fee and earn privileges, just like most OTT platforms.

Now what Twitter started doing recently was taking away key privileges like two-factor authentication for non-subscribers. Though it was dubbed to be a security-related move, it was, in fact, to encourage people to subscribe.

Likewise, all users who had a legacy verified blue tick and those who did not subscribe lost their blue ticks overnight. Of them were key official pages, celebrities, politicians, and others.

On Sunday, some of these users started to get back their blue ticks. While reports suggest that users with more than a million followers were given back their blue ticks, the blue ticks themselves prove otherwise.

When you click on the blue ticks that were reinstated, the following is the text you see. “This account is verified because they are subscribed to Twitter Blue and verified their phone number.”

Although it may be believable that those users actually paid the subscription fee, many claim they did not. “Apparently I’ve paid for Twitter Blue & given them a phone number to verify except that I haven’t. Mr Musk are you paying for mine as well?” writes politician Omar Abdullah.

So, are blue ticks given back to those users with more than one million users? Yes. But did they pay for it, like Musk always wanted to? Some claim they have not, but Twitter says they have all paid the fee.