Thank the bots, your blue check is back on X

What Elon taketh away, Elon also giveth. Fee-free blue checks on Twitter are back, but only for users with a certain number of followers who pay for X Premium. The X overlord decreed on March 27 in a somewhat confusingly worded post that all X accounts "with over 2,500 verified subscriber followers will get Premium features …

[Steve Button]

"What this effectively means is that legacy verification for notable accounts has returned, albeit in a manner indistinguishable from paid verification."

Well not quite. There were quite a few examples of left wing bloggers who had a few thousand followers getting a blue tick, whereas right wing "influencers" who had hundreds of thousands of followers being refused.

I'm neither hard left or hard right myself*, but I do prefer a level playing field. I'm not saying what we've got now is really any better, but it was definitely skewed before.

* so if you feel strongly either way, please feel free to give me a thumbs down and don't bother explaining why. I'll take it as a compliment.

[Hubert Cumberdale]

Wow. Looks like Steve got mardy enough to report someone for disagreeing with him. Which then resulted in a whole thread where numerous people pointed out how wrong he was being hidden. I hope he's proud of himself.

[Steve Button]

For the record, firstly I requested that the user stop making defamatory and unfounded remarks against me. Those remarks were pretty nasty. The next time it happened I reported them for abuse (not for disagreeing with me, I welcome that).

Don't try to shame the victim here. If they had just kept it civil the thread would have stayed up.

[No Relation]

It's funny how right-wingers often seem to be the first snowflakes to melt.

[Casca]

Sure, and you have proof?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think we're still on track to reach X Zero before Net Zero.

[aerogems]

The age old algebraic formula: X = 0

[aerogems]

Xitler keeps learning all the wrong lessons from his many failures at Xitter. He's even in denial about his many Xitter antics starting to bleed over into Tesla because... narcissism.

[urist]

It was never about verification

Leaving aside most of Steve's comment, it is indeed true that the old verification was never about verification, it was always about status.

To get verified, you needed either

1) Be a journalist with a well known news organization (that probably had some partnership/deal with Twitter, i.e NYT)

2) Be a corporation

3) Have a PR team ready to nag Twitter to death

The original blue checkmark was less of an indicator of verification (since many people with hundreds of thousands of followers never got verification) and more a symbol of a twat. In fact, if Twitter didn't like what you said, but didn't want to ban you, they could take away your blue checkmark, as they did to some well known actor (whose name escapes me, was apparently in Star Trek)

So I for one don't really care for the commoditization of the blue checkmark, because it was always a commodity, just the price has gone down.

[rg287]

Re: It was never about verification

To get verified, you needed either

Not quite true. I know a couple of people who had blue checks. They were "professional amateur" athletes - the sort of people getting to the Commonwealth Games, but not necessarily the Olympics. They had day jobs and some minor support from their Governing Body (a £500 monthly stipend, not an actual liveable amount like the fully supported GB squad). They definitely didn't have a PR team and were solely responsible for their Xitter accounts. They just applied and got it.

I vaguely recall Twitter might even have gone around and actively looked for those sorts of accounts and had a special run in Olympic/CWG/PanAm Games years to make sure people weren't impersonated (were there some extra security/monitoring options for blue checks as well?).

But yes. If you weren't "obviously notable" (like an "influencer" trying to establish their personal brand) then you probably had to nag them to death.

[DS999]

How long until

Musk threatens to sue Fidelity for making Twitter look bad with their continual writedowns?

He probably won't though - he only sues people who he has a massive monetary advantage over like non profits, hoping they will be afraid of a costly legal battle with someone with infinitely deep pockets.

[Anonymous Coward]

Life is too short

To waste even 5 minutes trawling the slime-pit that is X.

[Mostly Irrelevant]

Get off X, stop reporting on it, eventually it'll go away.