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Twitter to remove legacy blue checkmarks from next month
By Chris Cooke | Published on Monday 27 March 2023
Twitter last week confirmed that it will start removing the legacy blue checkmarks that identify verified accounts on its platform from the start of next month, so that only those paying for verification will be identified in that way.
The blue checkmarks were previously available for free to notable people and organisations, the idea being that they helped users to identify what was official content from celebrities, companies and brands.
However, after Elon Musk bought Twitter and quickly began finding new ways to generate income, it was announced that the blue checkmark would become one of the benefits of signing up to the Twitter Blue subscription package.
Meta recently announced that it would similarly start offering its verified account badge as part of a new subscription service, although with Facebook and Instagram the existing system of providing those badges to notable accounts that meet certain criteria for free will also stay in place, for now at least.
But on Twitter, celebrities, companies, brands and – of course – musicians who want to retain their blue checkmark will have to sign up to the paid-for service.
Elsewhere in Twitter news, the social media firm remains high up on the music industry’s gripe list because it still has no music licences in place, despite people tweeting loads of videos that contain music. And, reports suggest, ongoing efforts to change that and get some licensing deals in place are proving even more challenging since Musk took over.
The boss of the US National Music Publishers Association, David Israelite, noted that in a post on Twitter last week as the social media firm passed its seventeenth birthday.
“Twitter was founded on this date in 2006”, he tweeted. “Seventeen years later, despite a massive amount of music on the platform, Twitter STILL does not license music or compensate songwriters. Every other major social media platform licenses music. It’s time for that to change”.
With artists and musicians now facing the prospect of having to pay money over to Twitter every month to retain their verified status on the platform, the fact no money flows back in the other direction for the use of music in tweeted videos will be all the more annoying.
