UNITED STATES: On Thursday, blue ticks started to disappear from the Twitter accounts that were verified before as prominent accounts of celebrities, journalists, and media in light of the fresh policies that were initiated by Elon Musk, who bought the company in 2022 for $44 billion, began to get concretised. Musk has been trying to make this site profitable, which made him implement the erasure of “legacy blue ticks” for months.
The highly debated $8 monthly subscription would be implemented for new users wanting to secure a blue tick. The visible alterations on Thursday created a lot of perplexities, and many prominent users said they were unwilling to pay for the blue ticks and that the new policy should only be binding. Some also claimed they would not have Twitter accounts with the new policies.
The NAACP, a nonprofit organisation for human rights, has mentioned in their tweets that they would not be paying for the Twitter check marks, whereas a news website, SCOTUSblog.com, stated that they would not be posting on Twitter at all.
The risks of misinformation and the creation of fake accounts have been creating a lot of concerns, with many phoney government accounts impersonating the US Internal Revenue Service and filing taxes. On Thursday, some other accounts changed their account photos, faking prominent people.
According to Twitter, a special program can provide scope for government accounts to get the blue ticks, but more must be done to make it effective. On Thursday, Twitter’s headquarters in the Bay Area Rapid Transit system, the San Francisco Bay Area metro system, tweeted that they had brought this to the company’s attention but had received no response.
The creation of fake accounts has been an issue since Musk took over the company. Termination of the subscription program took place in November because of the number of “verified” accounts faking as popular organisations and people.
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