So Twitter finally did the thing they'd been promising since, honestly, I lost track — they announced the blue checkmark purge like three separate times before it actually happened. On Thursday (April 20th) they started stripping the old "legacy verified" badges off accounts that hadn't paid up for Twitter Blue, and for about a day my feed was just people posting screenshots of their own suddenly-checkmark-less profile like it was a personal injury.
I don't have a blue check and never did, so this whole saga is mostly just me watching from the cheap seats, eating popcorn. But the actual funny part happened the next day. Elon tweeted that he was personally paying for verification on three specific accounts: LeBron James, William Shatner, and Stephen King. His stated reason for King, paraphrasing, was something like "his tweets are gold." Which, sure, fine, except Stephen King had spent the prior week publicly saying he wasn't paying $8 a month for a checkmark and didn't understand why he still had one. So Musk, unprompted, just comped him. Same for Shatner, who's been openly hostile to the whole Blue rollout. It's such a specific, petty, slightly funny thing to do, hand-picking three people (two of whom are actively making fun of you) and paying for their subscriptions out of pocket like it proves a point.
(Small tangent, and I know it's a totally different company, but I stayed up way too late Wednesday night watching the Starship livestream out of Boca Chica. It cleared the tower, which is apparently the bar now, tumbled for a few minutes, and then they had to blow it up over the Gulf. People in the SpaceX chat kept calling it a "rapid unscheduled disassembly," which is such an insufferably cute engineering euphemism for "the rocket exploded" that I can't decide if I love it or hate it. Anyway. Different story, moving on.)
Back to the checkmarks. The bigger annoyance for actual users isn't the celebrity comps, it's that the rollout was inconsistent as hell. I've got friends whose checks vanished Thursday morning and others who still had theirs Friday night, no rhyme or reason to the order. Meanwhile a bunch of organizations kept their gray "official" badges without paying anything, which is apparently a separate program Twitter never really explained. If you're going to blow up a verification system that's been around since 2009, you'd think the messaging would be tighter than "some checks fall off whenever the script gets around to your account."
The $8-a-month price still feels like a weird number to me too. It's $11 if you pay through the iPhone app, because Apple takes its cut and Twitter just passes that straight to you. Not expensive exactly, just oddly positioned. Too much for a badge nobody respects anymore, not enough to actually fund anything meaningful for a platform this size. And the whole point of the original checkmark was "we confirmed this is really that person" — now it's just "this account has a card on file." Those are not the same feature, and calling them the same word is doing a lot of work.
What I actually think happens next: the checkmark turns into background noise within a couple months. Not because anyone fixes anything, just because the outrage cycle burns itself out and everyone moves on to the next thing. That's basically the whole internet news cycle lately, a week of yelling followed by silence. I'll give it until June before nobody's bringing this up unironically anymore.
Anyway. If this blog ever needs a blue checkmark to be taken seriously, we've got bigger problems than Elon Musk.