BENGALURU: Twitter on Thursday removed the blue ticks on all the legacy verified accounts across its site and this list of accounts to lose the verified sign includes several celebrities and politicians from India.
The only individuals with the verified blue ticks from now on are the ones who have subscribed to the Twitter Blue service. This service costs from USD 8 to USD 11 per month depending on the location and mode of subscription. They will also be given a few additional features compared to those without subscriptions.
According to this development, several celebrities including actors Shah Rukh Khan, Amitabh Bachchan and Alia Bhatt, politicians Yogi Adityanath, Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi and cricketers Virat Kohli and Rohit Sharma are among the Indians losing the verified blue tick.
Soon after Elon Musk’s takeover of the popular microblogging site, he announced that the verified tick marks will be available only to those who have subscribed for the same. This led to the creation of fake accounts for several key politicians and organisations with blue verified marks using the paid feature. This led to losses of money and fame to some of the organisations as well as individuals causing Twitter to restore the verified blue tick mark to the legacy verified accounts.
The verified mark was initially created by the organisation in 2009 to protect noted individuals and organisations from impersonation as well as the blogging site from fake information.
The company later decided to issue different coloured ticks to represent different entities like organisations, government agencies, politicians and individuals. Twitter had mentioned that it will be gradually winding up the legacy verified program and removing the verified ticks from the beginning of April.
It remains to see if the microblogging site will be able to avoid any controversies this time.
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