In a world where attention is everything, losing a verification badge on social media could tantamount to major life crisis for some people. Twitter- one of the most preferred platforms of people to voice their thoughts, last month announced that it would remove legacy verification badges starting April 1 and made it exclusive to the paid Blue subscribers. While some users may be scrambling their wallets, many have boldly stated that they refuse to pay the fee for these badges. Twitter has been swift to warn these users that their precious badges will be gone in a flash if they show intent to never pay for it.
Twitter last month announced to strip away the legacy badges of verification from users starting April 1. However, some users are still seeing it on their account. Twitter has not given any explanation on this but a tweet from Elon Musk which has now been deleted could be an answer to this confusion.
Musk in “then but now-deleted tweet” wrote that Twitter will offer “a few weeks grace” to users. He also added that the grace period for the non-paying checks will be of few weeks “unless they tell they won’t pay now.” In simple words, this means that Twitter has offered a grace period for users to cough up the cash before they strip away their legacy badge. However, accounts that have said they would never pay for it will have no grace period and will lose their badges. Media outlet New York Times (NYT) is so far the only account affected by this move. They lost their verification badge sometime around Sunday after a Twitter users tweeted at Musk that NYT has said it doesn’t intend to pay the $1,000 per month to keep its gold check, nor pay for members of its staff to retain their blue checks. “Oh ok, we’ll take it off then,” Musk said in response to the tweet on Saturday night.
According to a Washington Post report, the former employees have revealed that the process of removing verification badges on the platform is mostly carried out manually, relying on a system that is prone to breaking. Occasionally, employees have encountered issues where attempts to remove a badge have failed, leading them to seek alternative solutions.
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