All unpaid legacy Blue checkmarks will be removed in a few months’ (Picture: Photo/Gregory Bull)
After a disastrous first attempt at a new paid verification tier for Twitter, Elon Musk is planning to relaunch it by the end of the month.
On Tuesday, the billionaire said that Twitter’s short-lived blue check subscription service will be returning on 29 November.
‘Punting relaunch of Blue Verified to November 29th to make sure that it is rock solid,’ Musk said in a tweet.
Musk went on to clarify that once the new paid service was launched, ‘all unpaid legacy Blue checkmarks will be removed in a few months’.
Users also questioned the CEO about being allowed to change their names once they were verified.
‘With new release, changing your verified name will cause loss of checkmark until name is confirmed by Twitter to meet Terms of Service,’ replied Musk.
When asked if there would be a return of the ‘Official’ labels that the platform was going back and forth on, the billionaire replied that it was ‘hard to say who’s celeb & who isn’t’.
‘Being able to sort by follower count & disallowing deliberate impersonation probably solves this,’ tweeted Musk.
‘What will matter in the future is how many Verified followers you have,’ he added.
Last week, the Tesla chief had said Twitter Blue would probably ‘come back end of next week’. That timeline seems to have been pushed as Musk grapples with the challenges of running his new company amid a staff and advertiser exodus.
The coveted blue check mark on Twitter was previously reserved for verified accounts of politicians, famous personalities, journalists and other public figures.
With Musk’s Twitter Blue subscription option, the verified badge will be available to anyone prepared to pay.
Twitter paused its £7 blue check subscription service just as soon as it was launched as the number of ‘verified’ fake accounts impersonating politicians, brands and other high-profile accounts skyrocketed with some disastrous real-world consequences.
The paid service is part of Musk’s plans to make money from Twitter, after taking over the social media company in a $44 billion deal.
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A ‘rock solid’ version has been promised by 29 November.
