Twitter reintroduces the “official” badge… again. Stops Blue’s automatic verification subscriptions

The past two weeks, since Elon Musk drove a sink into Twitter headquarters to take control of the company, have been a period of constant chaos for the social media company. In that time, Musk has fired half the staff, called some back, introduced a for-fee verification system and removed it, brought in new free verification badges, removed them and brought them back, and the new owner is even threatening employees with bankruptcy. All decisions made in the last week have been reversed and reissued again.

Twitter chaos continues

After Twitter introduced Twitter Blue verification, i.e. displaying a blue tick for anyone paying the $8 a month subscription, more fake accounts started paying to impersonate real accounts of brands, companies or public figures.

Following these actions, Twitter introduced the “official” badge for real accounts, then removed it less than 24 hours after launch. Now, however, some accounts have been given the badge again, without explanation. It seems that these accounts are manually checked by Twitter employees.

Also, in order to avoid making new fake accounts with verification, Twitter is currently stopping the possibility of signing up for Twitter Blue subscriptions.

It remains to be seen when and in what form Twitter Blue will return, and what the long-term strategy for user identity verification will be. Whatever the company’s internal strategy, however, it could be derailed at any moment by the impulsive decisions of Twitter’s new owner and CEO, Elon Musk.

The billionaire says he’s also considering filing for bankruptcy proceedings for the company, just days after paying $44 billion.