Blue ticks for dead stars, fake account checkmarks, more Twitter Blue chaos updates

Elon Musk surely wants to transform Twitter into an effective money-generating company. However, the new administration is seemingly challenged in implementing its new plans, resulting in negative feedback and effects that further destroy its image.

Musk is trying to squeeze Twitter for cash after buying it for roughly $44 billion. The new management first introduced a paid verification and removed legacy checks for famous users, including the Pope, Shakira, and Lady Gaga. However, known personalities and organizations (that are big contributors in continuously making the platform attractive for other users) don’t want to pay. The billionaire then announced “personally paying” for the accounts of Lebron James, Stephen King, and William Shantner. Now, this is seemingly extended to more celebrity accounts. Over the weekend, Twitter was spotted returning the verification checkmarks to certain accounts with more than 1 million followers. Some include Neil Gaiman,  Lil Nas X, and Richard Osman, who all confirmed not paying to receive the badge. 

This move seems rational as celebrities and other known personalities have huge roles in making the platform enticing for regular users. It is unknown whether restoring the checkmarks would help boost the image of the paid Twitter Blue, but it will certainly ease the chaos caused by removing legacy verification marks to legit accounts. To recall, the introduction of paid verification allowed some users to commit impersonation and spread misinformation on the platform like wildfire. Now that the marks are brought back to some top accounts, the possibility of these issues happening to the platform again could be minimized.

However, the recent restoration of blue ticks seems to go beyond the living celebrities on Twitter: deceased stars are also getting it. As spotted by The Verge, dead personalities also recently got their own verification marks. Some of these accounts were from Michael Jackson, Chadwick Boseman, Kobe Bryant, Barbara Walters, Anthony Bourdain, and Paul Walker. It is yet to be confirmed whether it is just a mistake, but seeing it in deceased users’ accounts that Twitter claimed had “subscribed to Twitter Blue and verified their phone number” is undeniably off. And given that many current celebrities and personalities are already expressing dislike for the idea of having and paying for a checkmark, putting it on deceased individuals who can no longer speak for themselves makes the move questionable.

While these blue ticks are still available on the accounts of the dead celebrities, a recent “mistake” was already removed by Twitter when it mistakenly provided a gold checkmark to a fake Disney Junior account (@DisneyJuniorUK). As first spotted by Verity (via Tech Crunch), the account, which used to tweet racial slurs and gained more than 3,000 followers after the incident, is now suspended.