Elon Musk said Friday that legacy blue check marks would be removed soon, the latest warning from the billionaire that people who received verification under the old Twitter regime would soon be losing it.
The Twitter CEO’s announcement came in the form of a reply to another tweet saying that verification on the platform had become a joke, and that the “verification tick has lost the charm.”
“Legacy blue checks will be removed soon. Those are the ones that are truly corrupt,” the Tesla billionaire wrote.
This is not the first time that Musk has threatened to remove legacy blue check marks. He warned in December that they would be removed “in a few months.”
“The way in which they were given out was corrupt and nonsensical,” Musk tweeted at the time.
Under Twitter’s former management, verification was a free process carried out by the company itself to recognize notable public figures, so that they would not be confused with other accounts. After acquiring Twitter last year for $44 billion, one of Musk’s major changes was rolling out a Twitter Blue subscription plan, in which people or companies could buy their own blue verification check mark for $8 a month.
However, Twitter Blue quickly ran into trouble when people started impersonating major companies. In one notorious example, an account that bought its verification through Twitter Blue pretended to be the drugmaker Eli Lilly, and announced that insulin was now free (it is not).