Twitter Chaos: Fallout from Rollback of Blue Check Marks and Paid Verification Strategy

Twitter has long been a hub for breaking news, and for the dissemination of information from journalists, government agencies, and other verified accounts. However, on Friday morning, users woke up to a chaotic scene on the platform. CEO Elon Musk had initiated a wide-ranging rollback of blue check marks from celebrities, journalists, and government agencies, marking the end of traditional verification on Twitter.

The move signaled the beginning of a radically different information regime on the platform, one characterized by almost immediate impersonations of government accounts, the removal of labels previously used to identify Chinese and Russian propaganda, and a scramble by the company to re-verify certain high-profile figures such as Pope Francis.

While some media organizations lost their gold verification badges because they refused to pay the $1,000 monthly fee, others such as LeBron James, William Shatner, and Stephen King refused to pay for their badges, prompting Musk to personally intervene. He paid out of his own pocket to ensure their profiles continued to be verified, sensing the problems that might ensue if those users went unverified.

However, the broader impact of the change has been to make it more difficult for users to determine an account’s authenticity and potentially to undermine Twitter’s central role as a hub for news. Twitter verification is no longer an indicator that an account represents who it claims to represent; instead, it reflects that a user – or, apparently, the owner of Twitter – paid for Twitter Blue, the company’s subscription service.

Earlier experiments with changes to verification had led to similar chaos, prompting Twitter to postpone the rollout multiple times. Twitter continued to move forward with its paid verification strategy, however, with the hope of bolstering subscription revenue after seeing a sharp decline in its core ad sales business.

After Thursday’s change removed verification from New York City’s official government account, an impostor account bearing the same profile image and a slight variation on the official account’s username replied to the tweet, claiming to be the only authentic Twitter account representing and run by the New York City Government.

By Friday morning, the city’s verification had been restored with a gray check mark indicating it was a “government or multilateral organization account.” The same had occurred with Pope Francis, who had also lost his blue check mark Thursday.

In a seemingly unrelated and coincidental change, Twitter also stripped the “government-funded media” label from accounts belonging to Canada’s CBC and NPR, the latter of which had quit Twitter over the labeling because NPR said the label misrepresented the news organization’s editorial independence from the US government.

Twitter also removed the “state-affiliated media” labels from accounts belonging to China’s Xinhua News and Russia’s RT. According to NPR, Musk dropped all media labeling on Twitter following a suggestion from the author Walter Isaacson, who is writing a biography of Musk. Isaacson, who is verified on Twitter as a subscriber to Twitter Blue, tweeted a photo of Musk on Thursday from SpaceX’s Starship launch site. The rocket exploded in midair.

The removal of traditional verification on Twitter has created a new landscape for the dissemination of information on the platform. While the chaos caused by the changes may eventually be ironed out, it remains to be seen whether Twitter will be able to maintain its central role as a hub for news and authentic information.