Twitter recently announced on Thursday that the old verification program will be phased out beginning April 1. Only users who pay for Twitter Blue, which costs $8/month via the web and $11/month via in-app payment on iOS and Android, are eligible.
Twitter users had to request verification in the past. Their accounts had to be “authentic, notable, and active,” and they had to be a government figure or entity, entertainer, athlete, company, activist, content creator, news organization, or journalist, among other things.
Spam or parody accounts, as well as Twitter users who violated Twitter’s policies prohibiting hateful comments, harassment, or harmful activity, would not be approved. Verification may be revoked if policies are violated, or if a person changes their handle, is inactive, or has a misleading account.
However, those rules are no longer being followed. Twitter said it would “begin winding down our legacy verification program” on April 1, and that only accounts that actively subscribe to Twitter Blue — the company’s new verification program — would retain their blue checks. Those who received a blue check mark under the previous program will lose it unless they sign up for the new program.
- To subscribe, accounts must be complete, which means they have a display name and profile photo, and they must have had active use in the last 30 days.
- Accounts must be at least 90 days old, have not recently changed their profile, and cannot be deceptive. The account must not exhibit any signs of manipulation or span.
When Elon Musk took over the company and announced plans for a blue checkmark subscription, many critics raised concerns about impersonators and parody accounts paying for a blue checkmark, deceiving other users into thinking they are real people — not fake accounts pretending to be real people.
- Accounts that change their profiles will lose their checkmark until the Twitter Blue team reviews their subscription and deems them verified again.
- Accounts that do not follow Twitter policies risk losing their subscription program check mark.
Unlike previous verification criteria, new Twitter Blue subscribers will not be checked for activeness, notability, or authenticity, according to Twitter.
The subscription costs $8 a month or $84 a year and will not just come with a blue checkmark but “early access to features,” according to Twitter.
Subscribers can edit tweets, organize and bookmark tweets, change the appearance of their Twitter app icon and page, and even add NFTs to their profiles. Another new feature available to subscribers is a “undo tweet” button, which allows you to retract a tweet after it has been sent but before it is visible to other Twitter users.
Tweets can only be 280 characters long right now. Twitter Blue users will be able to send 4,000-character tweets.
Twitter Blue has been available at a lower price point since November, and it has already been relaunched once.
Those who signed up for $7.99 will be automatically renewed for a $11-per-month subscription. Those who signed up for $2.99 or $4.99 will be charged $8 or $11 per month, respectively. Twitter provided no explanation for the discrepancies.
Musk announced on Twitter that new Twitter Blue subscribers can sign up for the service for $7 per month. According to the Twitter website, localized pricing begins at $8 per month.
Twitter is also introducing new badges and check marks to distinguish different types of accounts: gold checks for official businesses or corporations, grey checks for government organizations and officials, an affiliation badge for accounts connected to an organization on Twitter, and a badge for state-run media entities and individuals who work for those entities. Twitter will add these badges for you.
“Any individual person’s Twitter account affiliated with a verified organization is automatically verified,” Musk said in a tweet on Friday.
