Twitter’s blue check apocalypse is here, and this is the full story (2024)

Twitter Blue subscriptions roll out globally, despite missing many promised features

Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge

People all over the world can now pay for Twitter, as the company has announced that its Twitter Blue subscription service is now available globally. While the subscription has been pretty widely available before (you could sign up for it in almost 50 countries), the expanded availability reflects the company’s drive to make Twitter Blue an increasingly important part of the service.

Part of those efforts, however, includes making promises that it hasn’t kept yet. The company’s announcement tweets list some of the benefits of Twitter Blue, such as getting a checkmark, the ability to write longer tweets, getting prioritized ranking in conversations, and seeing half as many ads. Those last two, however, haven’t actually rolled out yet. When you click on the link to sign up for the service, they’re still listed as “Coming Soon.”

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Hey, where’s the Twitter Blue revenue sharing Elon Musk promised a month ago?

Illustration: Laura Normand / The Verge

On February 3rd, Elon Musk made a big announcement. “Starting today, Twitter will share ad revenue with creators for ads that appear in their reply threads,” he said, later adding that you’d have to be subscribed to Twitter Blue Verified to get your cut. We here at The Verge spent the rest of the day waiting for more information about the program or for official support documents going more in-depth on how the whole thing would work.

After a month, it hasn’t appeared. Both the Twitter Blue and Twitter Creators accounts have been silent about the feature, it’s not mentioned on the Twitter Blue signup page, and Musk doesn’t appear to have brought it up since his initial announcement. I also wasn’t able to find anybody claiming that they’ve been making money from the feature. (If you or anyone you know has, please reach out!) As far as I can tell, the sum total of publicly available info on Twitter Blue’s ad revenue sharing is contained within Musk’s tweet about its launch.

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Now Twitter Blue subscribers can write 4,000-character tweets

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Twitter has launched a longer tweet feature, giving Blue subscribers in the US the ability to post up to 4,000 characters at once. If someone you follow uses the feature, the tweet in your timeline will have a “show more” button to keep it from taking up your entire screen.

Currently, there are a few limitations to the feature (besides the big one that it’s behind a paywall). If your tweet is over the standard 280 characters, you can’t save it as a draft or schedule it for later. However, most other normal features should work as usual — you can add hashtags or pictures, and non-Blue subscribers will still be able to interact with the posts as normal.

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Twitter announces ‘Blue for Business’ to help identify brands and their employees

Image: Twitter

Twitter has officially announced Blue for Business, a subscription geared toward companies that want to “verify and distinguish themselves on Twitter,” as its press release says. The service will let companies link their main accounts with those of their employees to make it easier to show that someone actually does work for them.

The company is testing the service with “a select group of businesses,” including its own employees. Esther Crawford, director of product management at Twitter, has a little bird badge next to her blue checkmark that verifies her as an employee at the company, as you can see in this tweet of her announcing Blue for Business. Craft Ventures, a venture capital firm, also appears to have some employees marked as affiliates, using a badge with its logo.

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Twitter Blue is back, letting you buy a blue checkmark again

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Elon Musk’s $8-per-month Twitter Blue subscription with verification is officially available, and you’ll need a verified phone number to sign up.

In a thread on Twitter, the platform notes that Blue will cost $11 per month if you sign up on iOS and will grant you access to the ability to edit tweets, upload 1080p videos, reader mode, and, of course, the coveted blue checkmark. If you paid for the old $4.99 / $2.99 Blue package, then you’ll need to subscribe again to keep its benefits, while anyone who signed up on Apple at the old $7.99 per month price will be automatically renewed at $11 per month unless they cancel.

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Elon Musk says Twitter will begin manually authenticating Blue, Grey, and Gold accounts as soon as next week

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Elon Musk says that Twitter’s check mark program could return on Friday, December 2nd, with a new procedure to verify individual identities in order to resolve impersonation issues. Musk described the new manual authentication process as “painful, but necessary.” Verified check marks will also be expanded with additional colors — gold for companies, grey for the government, and the original blue for individual accounts.

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Twitter won’t restart paid verification until ‘significant impersonations’ stop, Elon Musk says

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Elon Musk told Twitter employees on Monday that the company won’t relaunch its paid verification subscription, Twitter Blue, until “we’re confident about significant impersonations not happening,” according to a recording of his remarks obtained by The Verge.

Musk said last week that his $8 per month Blue subscription would be made available again on November 29th. But in the meeting with employees, he said the timing of the launch was unclear: “We might launch it next week. We might not. But we’re not going to launch until there’s high confidence in protecting against those significant impersonations.”

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Twitter Blue signups disappear a day after fakes and mayhem

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Twitter users are reporting that the option to sign up for the company’s new $7.99 subscription service, Twitter Blue, has disappeared from the platform’s iOS app just days after the service launched. After we first published this story Friday morning, Platformer’s Zoe Schiffer reported that the company has suspended the launch of Twitter Blue.

You could previously subscribe to Twitter Blue from the sidebar in the iOS app, but users this morning reported that the option has disappeared. For those for whom the link is still available, trying to sign up only returns an error message. “Thank you for your interest!” it reads. “Twitter Blue will be available in your country in the future. Please check back later.” (Some Android users on the Twitter alpha and beta report seeing the option to subscribe.)

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Twitter reactivated the ‘official’ gray check for accounts that are actually verified

Image: Twitter

Okay, so Twitter broke its own verification system by making the blue check —previously a signal that the account had provided information about its owner’s identity —available for purchase. Yesterday, which is approximately a month ago in Elon Musk time, a solution rolled out: gray checks that indicated that the account was official. By the end of the day, those checks had been rolled back.

Got all that? Great. After a great deal of impersonation, hoaxing, and other brand-unsafe behavior from the newly-purchased blue checks, the gray “official” checks are back.

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Elon Musk’s Twitter Blue with verification is now live

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

The new Twitter Blue, which now costs $7.99 per month and gets you a blue verified check mark, is officially available in its app for iPhones and iPads. Twitter owner Elon Musk began hyping the new Blue just days after taking over the company at the end of October, promising features like verification, priority in replies, mentions, and search, and “half as many ads,” and now you can actually get the new subscription.

Right now, for people who subscribe to the new package, their account instantly adds a verified check, but the other new benefits aren’t available yet. According to a support page, “only accounts subscribed to Twitter Blue on iOS on or after November 9, 2022 are eligible for the blue checkmark moving forward.” It’s unclear when the new subscription will become available for users on Android, Twitter web, or in countries where Twitter Blue wasn’t already available. And new Twitter accounts created on or after Wednesday aren’t eligible to sign up for Blue “at this time,” Twitter says.

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Twitter’s double-check verificationdisappears, Elon Musk says he ‘killed it’

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

After briefly rolling out new “Official” verified designations on Twitter, the gray badges disappeared this morning, just a few hours after they were first spotted.

“I just killed it,” tweeted Twitter’s billionaire owner Elon Musk, responding to a tweet about the gray check disappearing. “Blue check will be the great leveler.”

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Twitter rolls back gray ‘official’ checks that popped up on high-profile accounts

Image: Twitter

Several celebrity and publisher accounts now have a gray “official” check mark — in addition to the blue verified badge. News outlets, including Reuters, The New York Times, and Rolling Stone, are now double-badged, in addition to public figures, politicians, and other official brand accounts. Our @Verge handle is one of the accounts marked official, as of this writing, while Twitter’s reluctant new owner, Elon Musk, is not.

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Twitter’s solution for ruining verification is another check mark

Image: Twitter

Twitter is rolling out another type of check mark to help distinguish accounts that users actually need to know are real. Although you can pay $7.99 per month for a blue check mark with the new version of Twitter Blue, select accounts for governments, companies, or public figures will get a gray “Official” check mark, according to a thread from Twitter’s Esther Crawford, who is heading up the new Twitter Blue initiative.

“A lot of folks have asked about how you’ll be able to distinguish between @TwitterBlue subscribers with blue checkmarks and accounts that are verified as official, which is why we’re introducing the ‘Official’ label to select accounts when we launch,” Crawford says.

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Elon Musk says Twitter’s adding a new permanent ban policy for impersonation

Illustration by Kristen Radtke / The Verge; Getty Images

Elon Musk’s Twitter has a new rule for everyone with an account on Twitter to follow, as he announced from his own account: “any Twitter handles engaging in impersonation without clearly specifying ‘parody’ will be permanently suspended.” In a follow-up tweet, Musk said “Previously, we issued a warning before suspension, but now that we are rolling out widespread verification, there will be no warning.”

It’s an abrupt update from the person who just a few days ago tweeted, “Comedy is now legal on Twitter” after taking control of the company. Comedy is legal — as long as it follows the rules, which are whatever Elon says they are and could change at any time.

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Twitter’s delaying the launch of Blue with verification until after the elections

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Twitter’s pushing back the launch of its new Blue subscription with verification until after this week’s midterm elections, according to a report from The New York Times. According to an internal memo viewed by the outlet, a manager working on the project said they’ve “made the decision to move the launch of this release to Nov. 9, after the election.”

Elon Musk, Twitter’s new owner, announced the new $7.99 per month Twitter Blue earlier this month with perks like fewer ads, search priority, the ability to post longer videos, and the ability to pay your way to verification. Under Musk’s new rules, anyone can get a verified checkmark if they pay for Blue, sparking concern over whether users will be able to tell real accounts from fake ones.

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Elon Musk will let you pay $8 to be a verified ‘lord’ on Twitter

Kristen Radtke / The Verge; Getty Images

Elon Musk has announced that a new version of Twitter Blue will include some sort of verification accessible for $8 per month in the US, with the price “adjusted by country proportionate to purchasing power parity.” He announced the shake-up of the premium service by saying that “Twitter’s current lords & peasants system for who has or doesn’t have a blue checkmark is bullsh*t.”

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Twitter verification is the line between order and chaos

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Elon Musk wants Twitter to make money, and apparently, the first place he’s looking is its power users. Over the weekend, we learned that Musk plans to charge $20 per month for a Twitter verification badge, an update that might be rolled out next month. It’s a change that fits with Musk’s plans to make Twitter’s premium subscription service more valuable for its most active users. But verification serves a central trust-building role for Twitter — and Musk’s proposal could erode that trust just as the platform threatens to spiral out of control.

Every social network produces a unique posting style, and Twitter’s design incentivizes something slightly paradoxical: it’s one part newswire, one part nonsense. On one hand, Twitter is like a next-generation Bloomberg terminal where journalists post scoops and live coverage before it hits their websites and where politicians, businesses, and government agencies make official announcements about anything from customer service complaints to hurricane alerts. On the other, it’s the home of @horse_ebooks, Weird Twitter, a plethora of pseudonymous crypto evangelists and fandom stans, the Gorilla Channel tweet, and too many parody accounts to list. The first category benefits from Twitter’s default-public feed and rapid-fire text-snippet format — the second from how easily you can create accounts that aren’t tied to a real name or face and fire off bizarre jokes or hot takes.

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