Plenty of celebrities around the world lost the ‘blue tick’ on their Twitter account on April 20. The verified blue tick was a mark of authenticity and was originally planned to guard well-known personalities against impersonation. However, since Elon Musk took over the company in 2022, Twitter has been engaged in removing verified tick marks from accounts.
Notably, Twitter introduced its paid membership ‘Twitter Blue’ under the administration of Musk, which demands that users must pay a monthly subscription cost for the verified checkmark. Ahead of Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, blue checkmarks were granted to important personalities, journalists, CEOs, politicians, and organizations after their identities were validated as a sign of authenticity.
ALSO READ: Kuldeep Yadav Shares A Thought On Delhi Capitals’ Maiden Win In IPL 2023
Popular Indian cricketers, including MS Dhoni, Virat Kohli, and Rohit Sharma no longer have verified Twitter accounts. Similar to other social media platforms, they all have a large number of followers on the microblogging website. As a result of the new Twitter policy, legendary India batter Sachin Tendulkar also lost the verification ticks.
Interestingly, this happened not just to Indian cricketers, as one of the legends of football, Cristiano Ronaldo, also lost his verification tick on the platform. Meanwhile, basketball star LeBron James’ verification checkmark remained intact, as he might have already subscribed to Twitter Blue.
In November 2022, Elon Musk informed that Twitter would be charging $8 per month for the verification badge to generate income from various sources other than advertising. Following that, the company offered checkmarks in two additional colors – gold for business organizations and grey for government, multilateral groups, and officials.
ALSO READ: Sourav Ganguly opines on Delhi Capitals’ first win of IPL 2023
In addition, it has begun to display labels such as “state-affiliated” and “automated by” to indicate whether an account is associated with a government or not. Individual users are allowed to keep the blue tick marks paying $8 per month. Meanwhile, an organization must pay $1,000 per month to authenticate its account and an affiliate or employee account has to pay $50 monthly.
