Don't worry! Elon Musk doesn't have enough staff to remove your legacy blue tick

Twitter's top boss Elon Musk has made many changes to the social media platform in his six months at the company. These changes include mass layoffs, the Blue subscription, and even open-sourcing code. However, his vision of having blue verification checkmarks only for accounts who have paid for it, and phasing out legacy tickmarks seems to be an uphill task.

Last month, Twitter announced that the legacy checkmark holders will lose their verification status starting April 1. But instead of removing checkmarks, Twitter now displays a cryptic and confusing disclaimer that makes the verification identical with paid ticks.

Earlier, clicking on a blue tick badge on a user's profile would pop a window that offered one of two explanations. If the badge belonged to a legacy verified account, it would say, "This account is verified because it’s notable in government, news, entertainment, or another designated category." However, if the user paid Twitter for their little blue badge, the window would instead read, "This account is verified because it’s subscribed to Twitter Blue."

But now it says, "The account is verified because the user subscribed to Blue or is a legacy verified."

I love this. Surprised he didn’t do it earlier. Creates more problems while solving exactly zero of the other problems. A masterwork pic.twitter.com/2VOUe6rhfG

— Ed Zitron (@edzitron) April 2, 2023

The reason behind this goof up may be one of Elon Musk's great changes within the company.  According to a report by The Washington Post, removing the blue tick badges is "a largely manual process" that involves verification data saved in a spreadsheet. This means that there may be no way to bulk remove verification badges from legacy accounts as Twitter had implied it would do.

And, now with the social media platform operating with a significantly lesser number of employees after laying off over 60 per cent of its workforce globally, the process of manually removing the checkmarks may not be that easy and fast.

Hence, rather than actually remove legacy verified blue ticks, the microblogging site has made them indistinguishable from paid badges. Once again making impersonators completely indistinguishable from real accounts. 

A similar confusion had taken place when Blue was rolled out for the first time. Impostors took over the social media platform, assuming the identities of celebrities, and companies and spreading misinformation.

Meanwhile, removing legacy checkmarks has been on Musk's list ever since he took over Twitter in the historic $44-billion deal.

Legacy blue checks will be removed soon. Those are the ones that are truly corrupt.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 10, 2023

Far too many corrupt legacy Blue “verification” checkmarks exist, so no choice but to remove legacy Blue in coming months

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 10, 2022