X’s Legacy Blue Tick Marks Are Back, and You Can Get One for Free – Find Out How
- Popular X accounts will once again get blue tick marks for free, as long as they have 2,500+ real followers
- These users will also get access to premium features of X for free
- The original blue tick marks (used for verification) were removed and replaced by the paid blue ticks after Musk took over the company
In a significant policy change, X (formerly Twitter) has decided to bestow blue ticks on its most popular users for free.
In a recent tweet shared by Elon Musk, he announced that all accounts with more than 2,500 followers will get Premium features for free and accounts with more than 5,000 followers will get Premium+ features for free.
It's worth noting that this policy will only apply to you if you have 2,500+ or 5,000+ real followers" - bot followers do not count.For the same reason, X has also decided to clear out bot followers, so a lot of accounts might notice a dip in their follower count.
X has already started giving out these free blue ticks, but we don't know how many users will receive them.
Funnily enough, not everyone is super happy about this.
- For example, Marcy Wheeler (a journalist) tweeted that she has been forcibly given the tick mark and wants to opt-out.
- Similarly, Lauren Goode, a writer for Wired said 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."
X's premium plans offer a lot more than just the free blue tick. Premium users will have their tweets ranked higher when they are replying to others. In addition to seeing fewer ads on their feed, they will also be able to apply for revenue sharing from the ads on the platform.
Premium+ on the other hand completely removes ads from your feed, ranks your tweets even higher, and gives you access to X's new AI chatbot, Grok.
Why Did Musk Take away the Legacy Checkmarks?Just like most other social media platforms, X's blue ticks were originally offered to influential users such as celebrities, politicians, and other public figures. It was used to help distinguish the original accounts of these people from the thousands of fake ones.
Popular faces such as NBA player, LeBron James, and actor William Shatner even said that they wouldn't pay to have a blue tick.However, after Musk took over the platform in 2022, he made significant changes - one of them being the monetization of blue ticks. He said that he hated how the system divided people into more important and less important. In his words, lords and peasants."
So, to do away with that discrimination and to drive up X's revenue, he decided to remove the free verification marks and offer them against payment. This allowed anyone to buy the blue tick for just $8/month. Naturally, this move was heavily criticized.
Another major controversy sparked when it was found that Twitter had given the blue tick to Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah (terrorist group), and marked his account as ID-verified.
This brought severe criticism over the company's screening process. Although the mark was later removed, it left an impact on X's image.
Ever since Musk took over, the company has been troubled, to say the least. It started with laying off most of its workforce, followed by displeasing the advertisers, taking away verification marks, and now reinstating them.
Musk seems to have trouble deciding the best course of action for X. Given the uproar against receiving complimentary tick marks, it will be interesting to see what he does next.The post X's Legacy Blue Tick Marks Are Back, and You Can Get One for Free - Find Out How appeared first on The Tech Report.