Confusion as Twitter Yanks Blue Checks with Agencies

Twitter has long been a way for people to track tornado watches, train delays, news alerts or the latest crime alerts from their local police department.

But when the Elon Musk-owned platform this week began removing blue verification marks from accounts that don’t pay a monthly fee, public agencies and other organizations around the world were forced to look for a way to prove they’re trustworthy and avoid impersonators.

High-profile users who lost their blue checks on Thursday included Beyoncé, Pope Francis, Oprah Winfrey and former President Donald Trump. But checks were also withdrawn from the accounts of major transit systems from San Francisco to Paris, national parks like Yosemite, official weather monitoring equipment and some elected officials.

Twitter had about 400,000 verified users under the original blue-check system. Previously, the audits meant that Twitter had verified that users were who they said they were.

While Twitter now offers gold checks to “verified organizations” and gray checks to government organizations and their affiliates, it wasn’t always clear why some accounts had them on Friday and others didn’t.

Fake accounts claiming to represent Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, the city’s Department of Transportation and the Illinois Department of Transportation all began sharing messages early Friday falsely claiming that Chicago’s Lake Shore Drive — a major thoroughfare — would be closed to private traffic starting next month.

A critical eye can detect clear hints of fraud. The account handles are slightly different from the handles representing genuine Lightfoot and transport agencies. The fakes also had far fewer followers.

But the fakes used the same photos, biographical text and homepage links as the real ones.

The genuine accounts of Lightfoot and the shipping agencies did not have a blue or gray check mark on Friday. Lightfoot’s office said the city is aware of the fake accounts and is “working with Twitter to resolve the issue.” On Friday, at least one was suspended.

Several agencies said they were waiting for more clarity from Twitter, which has been cutting staff sharply since Musk bought the San Francisco company for $44 billion last year. The confusion has raised concerns that Twitter may lose its status as a platform for getting accurate and up-to-date information from authentic sources, including in emergency situations.

When a tornado was about to hit central New Jersey earlier this month, the National Weather Service branch office in Mount Holly, New Jersey organized data collection. It had a blue check at the time. It no longer has checks, although the main NWS account and some other regional offices now have a gray check to mark them as official accounts.

Susan Buchanan, director of public affairs for the weather service, said the agency is currently applying for a gray check mark for state agencies. He declined to answer why some regional NWS offices lost their ratings and others did.

The cost of maintaining ratings ranges from $8 per month for individual web users to $1,000 per month for organizational validation, plus $50 per month for each affiliate or employee account. But the meaning of the blue check has changed to symbolize that the user bought a premium account that can help their tweets be seen by more people. It also includes other features such as the ability to edit tweets.

Celebrities, from basketball star LeBron James to author Stephen King and Star Trek’s William Shatner, have declined to join — though all three still had blue checks Friday when Musk said he would cash them himself.

For users who still had a blue check, a pop-up message indicated that the account “has been verified because they have subscribed to Twitter Blue and verified their phone number.” Phone number verification simply means that the person has the phone number and verified that they have access to it – it does not verify the person’s identity.

According to an analysis by Berlin-based social media monitoring software developer Travis Browne, less than 5% of legacy verified accounts appear to have paid to join Twitter Blue.

Musk’s decision to end what he called a “lords and peasants system for those with or without a blue checkmark” has angered some high-profile users and delighted some right-wingers and Musk fans who saw the labeling as unfair. . But it’s not an obvious moneymaker for the social media platform, which has long relied on advertising for most of its revenue.

The mass withdrawal of thousands of blue checks, which had been promised for weeks, was combined with a surprise measure in which some media organizations are described as state-financed or state-linked. Musk initially defended a policy that bundled public radio and TV stations in the US and other democracies with state-linked media in Russia and China, then abruptly reversed course, but now Twitter has removed the stickers entirely without explanation. The changes come after National Public Radio and other channels have already stopped using Twitter.

While a few prominent users said they were quitting Twitter because of the blue checks, many government agencies appeared to be staying with the service.

Asked on Friday about the German government’s continued use of Twitter, spokeswoman Christiane Hoffmann said: “Of course we are watching very closely what is happening on Twitter and we are constantly asking ourselves whether it is right that there are channels and how we should continue them.”

Hoffmann said the government was worried about developments on Twitter in recent weeks and months, adding that ministries, spokespeople and Chancellor Olaf Scholz now have gray ticks “for which nothing is paid”.

Minneapolis city officials applied for a gray check to the city’s main Twitter account about three weeks ago and received approval Thursday.

Jordan Gildenbach, the city’s digital communications coordinator, said he plans to apply the same to other city-run accounts, including the health department — which did not have a check mark Friday — but said Twitter’s system will evaluate and decide which accounts are eligible. was really clear.”

“Whether it’s an active shooter situation or a weather-related event or even more routine things like blizzards, that’s always a challenge, even if it’s false and against rumors,” Gildenbach said. “This just makes it harder.”

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