ALBAWABA- Twitter users woke up to chaos on the platform on Friday after Elon Musk rolls back blue check marks from celebrities, journalists, and government agencies.
This marked the end of traditional verification and the beginning of a different information regime on Twitter, with almost immediate impersonations of government accounts. Labels previously used to identify Chinese and Russian propaganda have also been removed.
Several high-profile Twitter users, including LeBron James, William Shatner, and Stephen King, refused to pay for their verification badges, prompting Elon Musk to personally intervene. Twitter verification is no longer an indicator that an account represents who it claims to represent; instead, it reflects that a user paid for Twitter Blue, the company’s subscription service.
Twitter continued to move forward with its paid verification strategy with the hope of bolstering subscription revenue after seeing a sharp decline in its core ad sales business. After Thursday’s change removed verification from New York City’s official government account, the account tweeted Thursday evening, “This is an authentic Twitter account representing the New York City Government.” Later, another Twitter account bearing the same profile image and a slight variation on the official account’s username replied to that tweet, saying, “No, you’re not. THIS account is the only authentic Twitter account representing and run by the New York City Government.” By Friday morning, the city’s verification had been restored with a gray check mark indicating it was a “government or multilateral organization account.”
In a seemingly unrelated and coincidental change, Twitter also stripped the “government-funded media” label from accounts belonging to Canada’s CBC and NPR, the latter of which had quit Twitter over the labeling because NPR said the label misrepresented the news organization’s editorial independence from the US government. Twitter also removed the “state-affiliated media” labels from accounts belonging to China’s Xinhua News and Russia’s RT. According to NPR, Musk dropped all media labeling on Twitter following a suggestion from author Walter Isaacson, who is writing a biography of Musk.
