Twitter Blue nets 28 signups so far since legacy checkmark purge

The removal of legacy users' verified checkmarks finally happened on Thursday and the aftermath was unnerving for the platform. Early results culled from independent researchers about a day after the legacy purge showed that Twitter Blue only netted 28 new subscribers.

This is disheartening news for Musk's subscription service, as the purge was the billionaire's attempt to force verified users to pay for Twitter Blue. This strong-arm tactic has looked destined to backfire spectacularly ever since it was announced. As covered on Mashable before, celebrities like LeBron James and Stephen King have been very vocal critics of the move. The purge even provoked the ire of big-name shitposting accounts like @dril, who set out to block anyone who has a checkmark now.

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Travis Brown, an independent researcher who has been keeping track of Twitter Blue subscriber numbers, relayed the news on Twitter Friday. He noted that of the 400,000+ legacy accounts, only 19,469 were subscribed to Twitter Blue, and after the purge that number increased to 19,497. While Brown does not have direct access to Twitter Blue subscriber data, his methodology has been reliable in the past.

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Brown commented in the thread that anyone with an API account can verify his numbers, and he also explains how he gathers such data. Brown had earlier used his API access to confirm that legacy verification really has been purged from the platform.

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For context, Musk had originally planned to purge legacy checkmarks on April 1. That did not happen, but when the purge did finally move forward this week, some users discovered a glitch that revealed that legacy users' badges weren't actually removed, they were just hidden by the UI.

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It seems this issue has been fixed. But technical glitches and coding shortcuts are not uncommon since Musk took over last October. Possibly as a result of laying off 80 percent of his full-time staff, Twitter has experienced a deluge of weird bugs that have done everything from allowing copyrighted movies to be played in full, to outages of almost the entire platform.

The legacy checkmark purge is emblematic of Elon Musk's Twitter ethos: the billionaire CEO seems to have misconstrued the former value of blue checks to Twitter users, and seems to believe that value is monetary. In reality, having been introduced after former Major League Baseball player Tony La Russa of all people threatened to sue Twitter, verification once existed solely to stop impersonation on the app. It morphed into a status symbol, and then that status symbol became available to anyone with $8. Now the blue checkmark is associated with Musk's fans: largely NFT/crypto grifters and right-wing influencers.

In other words, Musk appears to have mistaken the past prestige associated with ID verification for something that can be commodified. But it now looks like that bubble has burst. With legacy accounts having had their checkmarks removed, and the platform's only ID verification system now saddled with stigma, the platform is facing a bad impersonation problem — a complication that spurred major advertisers to back out of Twitter in previous months.

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Back in March, Brown found more than half the accounts subscribed to Twitter Blue have less than 1,000 followers, revealing an unwillingness by the platform's power users to buy into the service. In an apparent attempt to circumvent this, Musk has effectively made verification free for a very small subset of influential users, personally paying for the verification of a few celebrities, including Lebron James, Stephen King, and William Shatner.

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So in a weird twist of irony, verification isn't cool anymore even though the coolness was what was supposed to convince people to buy Twitter Blue in the first place. The subscription numbers may not be cool for Musk's bottom line, but maybe those 28 new subscribers feel pretty fly right now.