The blue badges Verified account have been quite a controversial topic since Elon Musk became the owner of Twitter. Already with Musk in charge, in November of last year, the company began offering an 8 dollar monthly subscription, called Twitter Blueto get the famous blue pimp.
However, that service created hundreds of problems: many internet trolls paid the $8 just to impersonate personalities and companies and make implausible ads. For example, the shares of a pharmaceutical company fell after a fake account with blue pimp announced that insulin would become free. and a fake Lebron James he said he would leave lakers.
Twitter deactivated the impersonators and included a change to prevent this from happening again: to the accounts of companies, organizations, media, etc., it put a golden badgeand those of presidents, ministers, state/government entities and country representatives, a gray badge.
In addition, it introduced a notice to differentiate the accounts that pay Twitter Blue of those that were verified before the arrival of Musk to the company. But this also produced friction within the social network.
So, at the end of March, Elon Musk announced another measure: if any celebrity wants to keep the blue badge, they must pay the subscription yes or yes. To further that, Twitter put a new notice to the badge saying that the account was verified because it either subscribed to Twitter Blue or was verified from before. That is, he stopped differentiate them.
In response, a number of celebrities began posting screenshots to show they weren’t subscribed to Twitter Blue, and others, like LeBron James, announced they’d rather lose pimp blue than pay.
