Twitter has made other changes to its check mark and labeling systems in recent months.
Photo: Samantha laurey/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
Twitter Inc.’s move to remove legacy verifications is once again sowing confusion over who’s real and who isn’t on the social-media platform.
The check mark removals are one of the most drastic changes Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk, has made since he bought the platform in October. He has said for months that he wanted to make users pay a monthly fee to be verified.
The move immediately caused uncertainty. One user attempted to pose as the New York City government after the city’s government account, @nycgov, tweeted on Thursday that it was an authentic account. The user responded with an impersonating handle, @NYC_GOVERNMENT, saying, “No, you’re not.”
The impersonating account was suspended Friday morning.
Twitter didn’t respond to a comment request from The Wall Street Journal beyond an auto-reply of an emoji.
Mr. Musk has upended norms on one of the world’s most popular social-media platforms in real time, where newly paying verified users had coexisted in the past few months with legacy verified accounts. Some users have had trouble distinguishing notable accounts from impostors.
Elon Musk bought Twitter in October.
Photo: Benjamin Fanjoy/Associated Press
Twitter’s former leadership had given out free check marks to notable users. Mr. Musk has called the system classist. The old check mark system had helped users decide which accounts to trust, like those belonging to government agencies, companies, celebrities and journalists.
Formerly verified users including Beyoncé, Kim Kardashian, former President Donald Trump and Oprah Winfrey no longer had check marks on Friday morning, along with legions of celebrities, organizations and politicians.
Jack Dorsey,
a Twitter co-founder who sent out the first-ever tweet in 2006, also wasn’t verified Friday morning.Mr. Musk said Thursday he personally paid for LeBron James, William Shatner and the author Stephen King to have check marks through Twitter Blue. Mr. James and Mr. King have said they didn’t plan to pay to be verified, while Mr. Shatner had expressed concern about being impersonated.
“You’re welcome namaste,” Mr. Musk said to Mr. King on Twitter Thursday.
Taylor Swift
and Rihanna were also verified through Twitter Blue on Friday morning.Twitter has made smaller changes to its check mark and labeling systems in recent months. Instead of handing out blue check marks for every verified account, Twitter has given companies a gold check mark and government accounts a gray check mark.
The platform also labeled some news organizations’ accounts as government-funded, but it removed those designations this week. National Public Radio and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation stopped tweeting earlier this month after they received the labels.
Users who now pay $8 to $11 a month for Twitter Blue get exclusive privileges. Their accounts appear at the top of conversations and search results, above unverified celebrities, and they get benefits such as editing tweets, according to Twitter.
Twitter this week told advertisers they had to subscribe to Twitter Blue to continue running ads. The company recently launched a subscription program for businesses called Verified Organizations, which costs $1,000 a month plus a $50 monthly fee to verify employee accounts.
Mr. Musk has championed Twitter Blue as a way to boost the company’s subscription revenue and rely less on advertisers.
In an interview with the British Broadcasting Corp. earlier this month, Mr. Musk said his efforts to win back advertisers who had left Twitter combined with deep cost cuts and layoffs meant the company was roughly breaking even this year. He said Twitter has about 1,500 employees, down from nearly 8,000 when he took over the company in October.
Twitter Blue has as many as 635,000 paying subscribers, according to a recent estimate from Travis Brown, a Berlin-based software developer who tracks social-media platforms. More than 400,000 accounts appear to have had legacy verification, according to Mr. Brown’s analysis.
Write to Alyssa Lukpat at alyssa.lukpat@wsj.com
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