In 2022, when Elon Musk campaigned to buy Twitterbefore he realized he would be massively overpaying and went to court to get out of the deal he himself proposed, before he admitted defeat and took over the company in a $44 billion leveraged buyouthe promised to restore free speech to the site.

He vowed to right the wrongs of a dual-class system that had benefited the haves at the expense of the have-notsand he homed in on the blue check marks slapped on verified accounts as the culprit enabling this disparity. On his first day as owner of the site, Musk tweeted, Twitters current lords & peasants system for who has or doesnt have a blue checkmark is bullshit. Power to the people! [Twitter] Blue for $8/month. Lords and peasants!

So, a year ago, Elon Musk took blue check marks away from anyone who refused to pay him money. This week, he started giving them back for free.

While Musk wanted to frame the removal of blue check marks as some great anti-elite democratization, some Robin Hoodesque pursuit of justice, in reality it was always a money-making proposition. If Musk could make more money directly from users in the form of recurring subscription revenue, hed reduce the companys dependence on advertisers and their demands about what merits acceptable content on the site. (Musks laissez faire approach to content moderation has always been at odds with advertiser demands for a so-called brand-safe environment to place their ads.)

The main selling point for Xs subscription productonce called Twitter Blue, and now called X Premiumquickly became the blue check mark, though Musk has added features and benefits to the offering in the year and a half since. Suddenly, Musks favorite right-wing trolls and Tesla-to-the-moon fan accounts were all equipped with blue check marks, seeming more important and legitimate upon a quick glance.

But Musk fumbled his own plot. That became clear back in April 2023, once he removed blue check marks from people who used to have them.

For years, Twitter gave blue verification badges to a wide variety of important people. It was used chiefly to verify the identities of rich, famous, and powerful people like Beyonc Knowles or Barack Obama. That was important. Not only do people need access to the presidents tweetslet alone those of the queen of popbut verifying these accounts helped everyone by reducing confusion and scams. But Twitter eventually began identifying journalists, academics, and other people who could be repositories of reliable information. (Yes, myself included.)

Since X is often used as an up-to-the-minute news aggregatorand an internet hub for journaliststhese blue check marks gave the sites users a shortcut to quickly deem whether some piece of information was from a reputable or unreputable source. (Obviously, exceptions abound.) In other words, the blue check marks arent just a status symbol, but an important feature of a popular news site. According to Pew Research Center, more than half (53 percent) of X users still rely on it for news. What Musk never understood, or appreciated, was that the check marks helped Twitter as much as they helped the badge-holders.

Instead, Musk glommed onto the right-wing habit of using blue check as a derogatory moniker for elites. By abolishing the blue checks, Musks maneuver was a pronouncement that a new regime had taken power.

But naturally, once any single person could simply buy a blue check mark and appear legitimate for eight bucks a month, chaos ensued. It seemed like just about every corporate account was being impersonated. One fake account pretending to be the pharma giant Eli Lilly tweeted out, We are excited to announce insulin is free now, a tweet that caused mass confusion and led the stock to drop 4 percent. (Eli Lilly did slash the price of two of its most commonly prescribed insulin drugs mere months later, perhaps somewhat in response to the incident on X.)

Letting people buy blue check marks never made sense, but Musk erred in removing what he called legacy check marksthe ones that people didnt pay him for.

What the billionaire owner was too dense to realize was that the value of selling a blue check mark was mostly in blending in, appearing legitimate, and feigning importance. Removing all of the important people (celebrities) and pseudo-important people (me) simply turned the blue check mark into a blue badge of shame. By August 2023, Musk started figuring out that hed messed up and added a feature to let people pay $8 but hide their check mark. He also gradually began giving the most famous celebrities their check marks back even iflike Stephen Kingthey didnt want them.

This week, however, X began alerting many of the less famous but still popular accounts that had their blue check marks removed that theyd be eligible for a free subscription to X Premiumand thus the reinstatement of their blue badge. Going forward, all X accounts with over 2500 verified subscriber followers will get Premium features for free and accounts with over 5000 will get Premium+ for free, Musk tweeted on March 27.

Across X, many accounts that were regifted the blue badge tweeted to clarify that they did not, in fact, stoop to being so lame as to pay for a blue check mark. My blue check is back and I just want to make clear I am not paying El*n M*sk for this thanks very much, Wired writer Lauren Goode tweeted. Just to be clear, I did not pay for verification, film producer Franklin Leonard wrote. Its like a mole grew back, wrote New Yorker staff writer Emily Nussbaum.

Youre wondering about me? How nice of you. Apparently, Im still blue checkless, sofor nowIm in the clear. Good riddance.

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Elon Musk realized he created a badge of shame with blue checks on X. - Slate