it’s another day, And there’s another bizarre glitch in the Twitterverse. This time it includes paid Twitter Blue Badges, which are suddenly going up on accounts that have at least one million followers, except if the account holders haven’t enrolled in the subscription service. In fact, some of the account holders have died.
On Saturday, several users with at least one million Twitter followers reportedly noticed that their blue checks that went missing during Elon Musk’s purge on Friday, April 20 (which predictably didn’t recover) were Legacy Blue. Check verified accounts have now been restored. And many were unhappy with the change because they don’t support Twitter Blue. Still, the blue checks restored on Saturday show the accounts have been verified because they subscribe to Twitter Blue, an $8-a-month premium service that blocked key accounts to prevent misinformation and impersonation from spreading on the platform. Changed the free verification given to
“Wait, I’m crying they’re punishing them now,” tweeted Chrissy Teigen, sharing another account’s outrage over getting the badge back. After she shared, she too received the now dreaded badge of shame. “It won’t go away,” she moaned,
Teigen then found a way to make it disappear. “It’s gone! Okay everybody shut up nobody moves,” he joked. He shared with commentator Jon Favreau how to get rid of it, who asked, “What the hell did I do to deserve this” when he saw the blue check on his account. “Change your name and it triggers the removal of the checkmark. But then don’t talk about it again or you’ll get another,” Teigen advised him, “I’m serious.” At press time, Teigen is still holding strong without a badge, while Favaro’s blue check remains.
disturbingly, accounts of dead people – including Anthony Bourdain, Chadwick BosemanAnd Kobe Bryant – Have also received blue checks paid without explicit consent.
The recent move to give Twitter Blue accounts to high profile people even if they don’t want them isn’t all that surprising. The billionaire CEO recently admitted that he was “personally paying” for Twitter Blue subscriptions for LeBron James, Stephen King, and William Shatner.
It’s unclear what the actual cut-off is for the amount of followers an account must have to activate an auto-subscription badge (Twitter cofounder and former CEO Jack Dorsey, who has 6.5 million followers) did not have a badge at press time). However, the accounts of those reporting this have more than one million followers.
There’s no viable way to confirm details with Twitter now that the company operates without a press team, and emails inquiring about any new developments, including the email sent for this story, are marked with a single poop emoji. Receives an auto-response.
