With the removal of the old form of verification on Twitter yesterday (April 20), users are no longer eligible for the infamous blue tick badge on the basis of their notability alone.
Instead, the profile checkmark is only available for subscribers to premium service Twitter Blue, with the exception of some well-known names with a lot of followers.
However, even very famous people like Donald Trump and the Pope have lost their blue ticks, due to changes made under owner Elon Musk. Meanwhile, anyone with an account at least 30 days old can pay to have the marker appear on their profile.
When paid-for blue ticks first went live in November, it prompted chaos across the site as accounts impersonated individuals and brands. But Twitter has since beefed up its rules in a bid to prevent pranksters and fraudsters from pretending to be other people.
Nevertheless, it always pays to be on your guard, and to double-check who is behind the tweets, where you can.
Who can have a blue tick on Twitter?
There are now different types of verification on Twitter. The traditional blue tick is reserved for subscribers to Twitter Blue, which in the UK costs £11 a month on iOS or Android, or £9.60 on the web.
However, to prevent impersonation, Twitter now requires accounts to have been active for at least 30 days before they get Twitter Blue. Subscribers also have to confirm their phone number and cannot have recently changed their name, handle, or profile photo. Changing any of these while using Twitter Blue results in a temporary loss of the blue tick while the company checks the profile still meets requirements.
What other verification is available on Twitter?
In addition to the blue tick, there are now gold checkmarks and grey checkmarks.
Gold ticks are assigned to accounts that are verified organisations on Twitter, a service that costs £1,140 per month in the UK. Groups using it can then add their employees or other related people as official affiliates, for £60 a month per person.
Grey ticks, meanwhile, are for Government organisations at the national level. High-profile politicians, for example Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, have the grey tick, too.
It is also possible for Government officials and organisations which don’t qualify under the existing criteria to get their grey tick by going through the same process as a business and paying for the verified organisation status.
Twitter also uses labels on some profiles to signal that they are a certain type of account. For example, automated feeds get a little picture of a robot.
It labels some news accounts as state-affiliated or state-funded. However, the status of these labels is unclear after some were removed as part of this week’s changes.
What should I do if an account has no official verification on Twitter?
The issue some users may run into now that legacy blue ticks are gone is that many legitimate accounts will have no indicator that they are genuine. This may make it tricky to tell who you’re really talking to.
The first port of call when you need to check an account is to leave Twitter. Find the official website of the company or person you want to verify, and follow the link from their website back to Twitter, to make sure you’re landing on the right account.
Businesses often have links to their social-media platforms at the top or bottom of their web page. For example, at the bottom of this page, you will find the Twitter button that directs you to the Evening Standard’s account @standardnews.
It’s especially advisable to do this for customer service accounts, to make sure you aren’t giving away your personal information to an unknown entity.
If you want to find out whether information in a tweet is true, you could check the website or other socia- media profiles of the person or company in question, as well as looking for other sources.
When looking at a profile, giveaways that it might be impersonating someone include slight misspellings in the username, that the account is very new, and a lack of interaction with other relevant accounts. Make sure you read the bio, too, to make sure it isn’t a parody account.
