Bye, bye blue checks: Twitter wipes legacy verified badges from the platform
Chief Twit Elon Musk promised that Thursday — which just happened to be 4/20, you know, the stoner holiday — legacy blue checkmarks would disappear from Twitter.
That means people who were actually verified — celebrities, journalists, politicians, etc. — would be stripped of their verification badge, leaving only the folks who paid for Twitter Blue with checkmarks. As of publish time, the legacy check marks are slowly disappearing from our timelines, and users are reporting that their badges are "flickering" — there one second and gone another. Previously, Musk falsely promised to strip the badges — he last did so on April 1 — and he didn't even wait for the clock to strike 4:20 p.m. to do the deed.
For its part, Twitter even promised that April 20 is actually the day.
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Still, as we're in the middle of the mass blue-check removal, Twitter users were joking and meme-ing as we waited for the complete blue-check wipeout.
Halle Berry had a great joke about it.
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People wondered if Musk's plan all along was to make it seem like legacy checks actually did pay for Twitter Blue. After all, Musk has had tremendous difficulty getting legacy checks to pony up the $8 per month.
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Lots of jokes were made at Musk's expense.
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And then there just lots of jokes, in general.
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It remains to be seen if today is actually the day Musk strips folks of checkmarks. But for now, we can all sit around, wait, and joke about it.
Tim Marcin is an Associate Editor on the culture team at Mashable, where he mostly digs into the weird parts of the internet. You'll also see some coverage of memes, tech, sports, trends, and the occasional hot take. You can find him on Bluesky (sometimes), Instagram (infrequently), or eating Buffalo wings (as often as possible).
