Tech Tok: Fiasco over Blue Tick remains chaotic
We all know about how Musk introduced Twitter Blue, a subscription service that will provide users with special features and allowances
Published Date - 26 April 2023, 12:45 AM
If recent developments at Twitter are taken into consideration, it is safe to say that Twitter CEO Elon Musk wakes up every day with an innate desire to create chaos on the micro-blogging website.
The latest is nothing short of a disaster for a platform of such repute. But since it is Musk, it is largely being treated as any other bizarre issue at Twitter. So, here’s what happened.
We all know about how Musk introduced Twitter Blue, a subscription service that will provide users with special features and allowances. What he also did simultaneously was nudging users with a legacy blue tick to quickly subscribe if they want to keep their verified status intact.
However, not all of them obliged. Some paid and some did not. Those who did not subscribe, on Friday, were stripped of their blue tick badge. Now, the blue tick, over the years, has become a way for people to deem the account as verified and authentic. With this new Twitter Blue system, anyone can pay and get a verified blue tick.
But wait, that is not it. In a surprise turn of events; most celebrities, politicians, and others mysteriously got back their blue ticks on Sunday. While it was largely agreed that those with over a million followers were given back their verification badges, there was something off about the whole thing.
When one would click on the blue tick badge for these accounts, the following is the text you see. “This account is verified because they are subscribed to Twitter Blue and verified their phone number.”
However, many users including Omar Abdullah, Nidhi Razdan, MIT, and others have publicly claimed that they have not paid Twitter for the blue tick. In fact, Twitter also awarded blue ticks to accounts of Sushant Singh Rajput, Sidharth Shukla, Michael Jackson, and many other dead celebrities and said that they have verified and subscribed to Twitter.
Many influential users of the platform called out Twitter for falsely claiming that they paid for the blue tick and demanded the platform to be honest about when, why, and how they award their verification badges.
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