Elon Musk’s Twitter is a mess

Elon Musk confirmed a few weeks ago that as of April 1, those accounts that had the old verification they’d lose the badge if they didn’t pay for Twitter Blue, but the plans did not materialize, as the magnate expected. Today, none of these accounts lost verificationPresumably due to technical issues. To try and fix this issue, Twitter has made a change to the message that appears when you click on the blue icon, and all it does is make it even more confusing.

Now, if the user clicks on the confirmation icon that appears next to the account name, the following message is displayed: “This account has been verified because it follows Twitter Blue or is an outdated verified account.”. So it’s very difficult to know if a user with a blue mark is paying $8/month for Blue or if they have it instead because Twitter has considered their account relevant in the past.

While Elon Musk hasn’t confirmed why this change in the icon’s description, everything indicates that technical difficulties with large-scale deverification of old accounts. how common Washington Post A few weeks ago, the process of removing verification from an account was a manual process.

“Verification badge removal is mostly a manual process, managed by a crash-prone system that relies on a large internal Excel spreadsheet-like database that stores verification badges. […]. In the past, it was not possible to reliably remove the icons at scale, which meant that spam workers, for example, had to uncheck the boxes one by one.”

It says Washington PostT.

This process is also did not always work correctly. “Sometimes an employee tried to remove the sign, but the change was not applied,” the former employee told the aforementioned publication.

Major companies and governments refuse to pay for Twitter Blue to support verification

It is the manual icon removal process that we have seen recently. Musk in particular decided to suspend the “legacy” verification of the official account The newspaper “New York Times after the outlet confirmed that it was not going to pay $1,000 per month to verify the business.

The White House has confirmed that they are not going to pay for Blue either. However, the official profile of this government organization, as well as others associated with it, such as those of Joe Biden or Kamala Harris, are grey-checked. They point out, in particular, that the “this is verified because it is a government or multilateral organization account”.

Musk also confirmed that these verified accounts will have more reach. Well, with the exception of the accounts the user follows, they will be the only ones that will show up in the recommendation feed.