Elon Musk confirmed a few weeks ago that, as of April 1, those accounts that had an old verification, they would lose the badge if they did not pay for Twitter Blue, but the plans have not turned out as the tycoon expected. Today, none of these accounts have lost verificationPresumably due to technical problems. To try to solve it, Twitter has made a change in the message that appears when clicking on the blue icon, and all it does is confuse even more.
Now, if a user clicks on the verification badge that appears next to an account name, the following message is displayed: “This account is verified because it is subscribed to Twitter Blue or is a legacy verified account”. This, therefore, makes it very difficult to know if the user who has the blue mark is paying $8 per month for Blue or if, instead, he has it because, in the past, Twitter considered his account to be relevant.
Although Elon Musk has not confirmed why this change in the description of the badge, everything points to the technical difficulties in de-verifying old accounts on a large scale. as shared The Washington Post A few weeks ago, the process of removing verification from an account is something that is done manually.
“The removal of verification badges is a largely manual process driven by a break-prone system, which relies on a large internal database, similar to an Excel spreadsheet, in which the verification badges are stored. verification data, according to former employees […]. In the past, there was no way to reliably remove badges at scale, which meant workers dealing with spam, for example, had to remove checkmarks one by one.”
It states The Washington Postt.
This process also didn’t always work correctly. “Sometimes, an employee tried to remove a plate, but the change was not applied,” a former employee told the aforementioned outlet.
Large companies and governments refuse to pay for Twitter Blue to maintain verification
Precisely, the manual process when removing the badge is something that we have seen recently. Musk, specifically, decided to suspend the “inherited” verification of the official account of the New York Times after the outlet confirmed that it was not going to pay the $1,000 a month that business verification costs.
The White House confirmed that it was not going to pay for Blue either. However, the official profile of this government organization, as well as that of other related ones, such as the profiles of Joe Biden or Kamala Harris, have a gray verification. These, in particular, indicate that the account “it is verified because it is the account of a governmental or multilateral organization”.
Musk also confirmed that those verified accounts would have a greater reach. Well, with the exception of the accounts that a user follows, they will be the only ones that will appear in the recommendation feed.