Twitter descends into chaos as media and companies miss the check mark

() — Twitter users woke up Friday morning to even more chaos on the platform than they had become accustomed to in recent months under CEO Elon Musk after a sweeping reduction of celebrity blue check marks, journalists and government agencies.

The end of traditional verification ushered in a radically different reporting regime at Twitter, one highlighted by almost immediate impersonations of government accounts; the removal of labels previously used to identify Chinese and Russian propaganda; and a fight by the company to individually re-verify certain high-profile figures like Pope Francis.

A wide range of media organizations lost the gold verification badges that Musk’s team had developed months earlier as an alternative to traditional brand verification, which reflects the apparent negative of those organizations to pay for the badges that now cost US$1,000 per month.

Several prominent Twitter users, including LeBron James, William Shatner and Stephen King, also refused to pay to keep their verification credentials, prompting Musk to intervene personally. Seeming to sense the problems that could arise if those users were not verified, Musk said Thursday that would pay out of his own pocket to ensure that the profiles of James, Shatner and King would continue to be verified.

“My Twitter account says I signed up for Twitter Blue. I have not done it. My Twitter account says that I have given a phone number. I have not done it”, King tweeted.

“You’re welcome, namaste”, replied Muskadding a prayer emoji.

While some of the more visible issues with the release could be resolved in the coming days, the broader impact of the change has been to make it more difficult for users to determine the authenticity of an account and potentially undermine Twitter’s central role as a hub of information. news. Twitter verification is no longer an indicator that an account represents who it claims to represent; instead, it reflects that a user — or, apparently, the owner of Twitter — paid for Twitter Blue, the company’s subscription service.

Previous experiments with verification changes they had led to a similar chaos, which led to Twitter postponing the release multiple times. However, Twitter continued to push forward with its paid verification strategy, hoping to boost subscription revenue after seeing a sharp drop in its core business of ad sales.

After Thursday’s change removed verification from the official New York City government account, the account tweeted Thursday night: “This is an authentic Twitter account representing New York City government. York”.

Later, another Twitter account with the same profile picture and a slight variation on the username from the official account responded to that tweet.

“No, it’s not,” said the impostor’s account. “THIS account is the only authentic Twitter account that is represented and administered by the New York City government.”

By this Friday morning, the city’s check had been restored with a gray checkmark indicating it was a “government or multilateral organization account.” The same had happened with Pope Francis, who had also lost his blue check mark on Thursday.

In an apparently unrelated and coincidental change, Twitter also removed the “government-funded media” tag from accounts belonging to CBC Canada and NPR, the latter of which had dropped Twitter over the tag, as NPR said the tag misrepresented the news organization’s editorial as independent of the US government.

Twitter also removed the “state-affiliated media” labels from accounts belonging to China’s Xinhua News and Russia’s RT.

According to NPR, Musk removed all media tags on Twitter following a suggestion by author Walter Isaacson, who is writing a biography of Musk. Isaacson, who is verified on Twitter as a Twitter Blue subscriber, tweeted a photo of Musk Thursday from SpaceX’s Starship launch site. The rocket exploded in midair.