I accidentally removed my “verified” status on Twitter when I changed my username to reflect that I now work at Bloomberg Opinion. After a decade among the blue-tick elites, I was back with the mortals. But where I’ve bravely gone, others must soon follow: From April 20, Elon Musk’s Twitter will remove blue checkmarks from “legacy” verified accounts — unless they pay up.
That’s the plan at least. It’s not the first time Musk has threatened such a step, only to stall. But assuming his (heavily diminished) engineering team has figured out how to make the changes, we can expect blue ticks to begin disappearing across the network on Thursday. It affects everyone on the platform, but it poses a particular dilemma for one extremely prominent constituency: media organizations.
