For those not keeping track (and believe me, I can understand not doing so): starting in 2009, Twitter designated some of its users as "verified" by appending a "blue check" (actually a white check mark on a blue star) to their usernames. The company's process for identifying users to verify was never clear -- there was no official process for users to request verification until 2021 -- but it was mostly provided to celebrities, politicians, journalists, and organizations (the very first blue check was for the account run by the Centers for Disease Control). The goal, broadly speaking, was to assist the public in differentiating posts by genuine public figures from posts by impostors or parodies.
After Elon Musk purchased Twitter last fall, he announced that the verified blue-checked status would become available for anyone to purchase at a rate of $8 per month. He subsequently announced that "legacy" blue checks would be removed, meaning that everyone who wanted to continue to have verified status would need to pay for it. That policy went into effect around noon last Thursday, April 20.
Surprise! The overwhelming majority of previously verified users opted not to pay the new fee. Accordingly, they lost their checkmarks, which meant that as of late Thursday, almost the only Twitter participants showing as verified were those who had paid the fee over the previous few months. (That's about 25,000 people, I believe.) And those people, who thought they had paid to join an elite club, were not happy to find that all the people that they thought were cool had left the club.
Then on Friday, some previously verified figures, like horror author Stephen King and basketball star LeBron James, who had chosen not to pay and thus had become unverified on Thursday, suddenly were verified again -- much to their consternation. Musk announced that he was gifting verification to some people. Those people protested that they didn't want verified status any longer. But on Saturday, the reverification process expanded from a relatively small number of people to most or all users who had more than one million followers. Since then a vast range of people from Ian McKellen to Paul Krugman were announcing that despite their restored blue checks, they weren't and wouldn't be paying Twitter.
Some of the newly blue-checked had never previously had verified status. One of the most prominent newly verified users was the humorist Paul Dochney, the long-pseudonymous poster who goes by the screenname dril (@wint). Dochney, like many other newly verified or re-verified users, tried to return to unverified status using a workaround that someone quickly found: if a user changes their screenname, it removes verification. But someone at Twitter was apparently monitoring such corrections and was re-verifiying some users who had unverified themselves. In Dochney's case, this meant that Saturday night was a cycle of him repeatedly changing his name and losing his verified status followed by Twitter reinstating that status shortly afterwards. Eventually Twitter gave up, because Dochney no longer has the blue check (and his account is now named "slave to woke"). Was Musk personally directing this activity? He's taken the time to reply to and in some cases mock public figures who have tweeted this weekend that they no longer wish to be verified. When Krugman did so, Musk replied with a picture of a crying baby. You'd think the man whose rocket blew up on Thursday might have better things to do with his time.
Oh, and in the process of verifying major accounts, Twitter verified a bunch of dead people like Chadwick Boseman, Kirstie Alley, and Kobe Bryant.
What Musk and even more so his cult don't seem to realize is that Twitter was the beneficiary of years of free content posted by these verified users. They mistakenly believe the opposite is the case. Here's one well-known Musk ally's comment on Friday: "Hollywood celebrities are showing exactly who they are right now -- arrogant elitist snobs worth $200 million dollars who won't pay $8 because they think they're better than everyone else." That was just a few hours before Musk started giving away the blue checks!
(Edited to delete unfinished sentence.)
