TWITTER CEO ELON Musk finally made good on his promise to strip thousands of accounts of their verification badges, commonly known as blue ticks, yesterday.

Many major news services, such as RTÉ News, Reuters, AFP and CNN, now have no mark distinguishing them from copycat or counterfeit accounts. The Journal is among those publishers to have lost its verification badge. 

Since taking control of Twitter in October last year, Musk has repeatedly warned that verification badges would be exclusively available to members who pay at least €8 a month for Twitter Blue, Twitter’s subscription service. 

Twitter has also stripped thousands of celebrities of their verification badges, including Beyoncé, Cristiano Ronaldo and Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson. Elon Musk has said that he is ‘personally paying for’ verification badges for several high-profile Twitter users, including Stephen King, Lebron James and William Shatner.

All three had used Twitter to explicitly announce that they would not be paying for Twitter Blue. 

Some state organisations, such as Met Éireann, An Garda Síochána, and various government departments, have retained a grey checkmark that identifies them as a ‘government or multilateral organisation account’. 

Certain changes suggest that Twitter has not entirely refined its new approach to verification. Yesterday, the Pope’s Twitter account lost its verification badge, only for it to be replaced earlier this morning with a grey tick, marking it as a government account. 

Similarly, some accounts have reported their verification badge disappearing and reappearing intermittently.

Twitter has also removed ‘State-affiliated media tags’ from state-run media organisations such as RT, CCTV, and Xinhua China News.

Some have speculated that this move was accidental, owing to the chaotic nature of Twitter at present, largely a result of cutting half of its workforce and the unpredictable whims of Musk himself. The website now regularly suffers bugs and outages, stops external links from working, and Musk himself has at various points intimated possible legal battles with Microsoft and Apple. 

Verified account Unverified account pic.twitter.com/6MLJWU6sAV

— Elad Nehorai (@EladNehorai) April 21, 2023

Why all the fuss?

The move has added an additional layer of uncertainty to a platform that millions of people use as a direct source of news, by following journalists, public figures and government services.

Originally founded as a micro-blogging platform, Twitter rose to prominence after it found favour with celebrities, journalists and news services – quickly becoming a hub of breaking news activity and live reaction from key stakeholders in any major event. 

Between 2015 and 2020, Twitter also served as the preferred mode of communication for US President Donald J Trump, who was banned from the site following the January 6 Capitol riots. Trump’s account was reinstated by Musk, though Trump has not returned to the site, and as of yesterday, his account – which still has 87 million followers – has been unverified.

Until Musk’s takeover, the most reliable way to distinguish between an official source of information and an impostor was the blue tick. This tick is now exclusively available to anybody who pays for Twitter Blue, which in many ways has inverted the original intention of the badge. 

Users now must undergo a more rigorous scan of their sources on Twitter, personally verifying that an account is what it claims to be. While it may be difficult for the average troll to competently impersonate Beyoncé, the move will cause problems for local journalists, local public officials, and sources of official information. 

It has been repeatedly demonstrated by US Senator Ed Markey that Twitter is also verifying Twitter Blue subscribers who sign up using a fake identity, undermining confidence even in those official accounts who have decided to pay for Twitter Blue.

Twitter may lag behind the likes of Instagram, WhatsApp, TikTok and others in terms of  popularity, but the knock-on effects of this change will be felt by anyone who receives their news on social media, much of which is originally reported through Twitter.

While blue ticks might now become a rare sight when scrolling through your own Twitter feed, a scan of major spreaders of misinformation show that they are common on accounts dedicated to propagating arguments against the existence of climate change, sharing Russian military propaganda, or falsely claiming that vaccines are regularly lethal.

While subscribing to Twitter Blue is still and easy way for users to buy reach, as well as providing bonuses such as removing the character limit on tweets, its ability to signal credibility is fading fast.

With additional reporting from Shane Raymond.