Following Elon Musk’s new commercial policy, Twitter maintains a scholarly vagueness on the meaning of the famous blue badge, now common to certified accounts and paying subscribers. However, there are tips for getting there.
Who’s who on Twitter? Since 1er April 2023, the social network maintains confusion over the meaning of the famous blue badge. And it is no longer possible to distinguish at first glance certified accounts from paid accounts, those of subscribers to the premium service Twitter Blue recently deployed to monetize the platform. Not easy, therefore, to make the difference between “historic” and reliable members at all coming in search of notoriety, who paid to obtain the distinctive badge…
From the birth of Twitter in March 2006 until its takeover in October 2022 by billionaire Elon Musk, nearly 420,000 accounts (out of the social network’s 240 million daily active users) have been certified. , that is to say an official recognition and identification procedure. Verification confirmed by obtaining a blue badge put forward by the lucky ones. These were accounts of stars, political figures, journalists, organizations or recognized companies. If it was not free from defects, this procedure strongly contributed to credibility of the interactions on the social network.
Twitter Blue: a badge for paying subscribers
Only here, after having bought Twitter last fall for 44 billion dollars, the new master of the place, Elon Musk, recently admitted that his company was only worth $20 billion, it therefore became urgent, failing to make such an investment profitable, to monetize it at a forced march. And to achieve this, Elon Musk unsheathed Twitter Blue; this paid and premium service grants its subscribers certain advantages, advanced features as well as the famous blue badge, formerly reserved for certified accounts. Price of the service in France, between 9 and 11 euros per month depending on whether you subscribe on the Web, on iOS or on Android. According to Elon Musk, the idea is to promote a certain egalitarianism on the social network, egalitarianism which concerns those who can afford this new subscription but not the 500 largest advertisers on Twitter, nor the 10,000 most followed companies on the social network exempted from going to the checkout.
And to ensure the success of his business, Elon Musk decided that it would no longer be possible to visually distinguish old certified accounts from new subscriber accounts. Result, a blue badge for everyone and if you pass the mouse over the precious dot a message appears indicating that “this account is certified because it is subscribed to Twitter Blue or because it had obtained certification with the ‘old system’.
Twitter blue badge: how to distinguish certified and paid?
So how do you get there? There are two ways to separate the wheat from the chaff. But nothing guarantees that they will work for a long time…
First, throwback to old times, if you want to verify that an account is indeed historically verified, you can go directly to the Twitter Verified account (@verified) an official Twitter account which had the particularity of subscribing to all accounts officially certified by the social network. All you have to do is check the list of “subscriptions” to see if the account you are looking for is there.
Then, there is an extension for Internet browser (available on Chrome and Firefox), and mischievously baptized Eight Dollars (referring to the US price of the new Twitter Blue service). This time, it’s about downloading and installing the extension on your browser and once on Twitter, you will be able to see each time you come across an account with a blue badge if it has been certified (“verified”) or simply paid via Twitter Blue (“paid”).
Still, these recognition solutions could unfortunately only be temporary because today Twitter maintains the vagueness on the future of the badges (checkmarks or dots) formerly attributed to certified accounts. “Twitter will no longer accept new certification requests based on the old criteria. (active, notorious and authentic account)“specifies the social network, which also reserves “the right to remove the tick from an account at any time and without notice”. Why take tweezers? Some media like New York Times (55 million subscribers) who, like the White House or personalities like LeBron Jamesrefuse to pay the subscription to Twitter Blue have already made the bitter experience of it, by seeing themselves removing the famous differentiating badge, which, Twitter Blue helping, is, in fact, no longer really.