Wednesday night, something odd happened to me on Twitter/X. An alert popped up in my notifications: “As an influential member of the community on X, we’ve given you a complimentary subscription to X Premium …”
Suddenly, the Twitter blue checkmark next to my user name that had disappeared a year ago was back. Uh oh. I found myself in a tough spot.
It’s been about a year and a half since the old blue check verification system was dismantled in favor of the new paid system. During this time, the blue check has come to mean something very specific: someone who actually pays for X. Someone who is willing to pay to promote their own tweets. Someone who believes that X is a platform worth investing in rather than one that is slowly descending into chaos and irrelevance. Someone incentivized by ad-sharing payouts to post engagementbait and ragebait.
(OK, I’m sure that not ALL people who were paying for a blue check fall into those categories. I’m sure some are just nice people who like the service. I haven’t personally come across those people, but surely they exist?)
There hasn’t been an official explanation of why a bunch of formerly verified people just got a free blue check. But recently, Elon Musk tweeted that X would be giving free premium subscriptions to users with 2,500 paid subscriber followers. (X did not respond to a request for clarification on this policy.)
This affects people with massive followings, or, for people like me with under 100,000 followers, it probably means you have a higher-than-normal amount of appeal to people who pay for X. (In my case, I suspect it’s because I’ve reported on NFTs and crypto, a topic that tends to attract paid blue checks.)
I’m not sure what to do.
I don’t want people to think I paid for this (ew). I can use the option to hide the blue check on my profile (although I’ll still show up as a verified user in people’s notification tab; it’s not completely secret).
Or do I keep the blue check because now there are enough other people who don’t pay for it that it isn’t an instant flag that I’m a massive jerk? Maybe it actually does look like I’m important and influential (and of course, I like to seem important and influential; what else do I have going for me?)
Back in 2022 when Twitter Blue first launched (pre-Elon), I happily paid the $2.99 a month for the extra features it offered. I figured the modest fee was worth it for improved features on an app I used, uh, constantly. And honestly? It was great.
I loved the “Top Articles” feature, which showed a list of the most shared news stories among the people I followed—it was a great way to quickly see what stories people were buzzing about.
I also appreciated having an “Undo” button for a few seconds after I sent a tweet — a chance to catch a typo or think twice about posting something. Getting those two features back has been wonderful — I truly missed them.
And now there’s a bonus: I can rearrange the navigation buttons at the bottom of the app to finally get rid of the Grok tab!
I think the only reasonable answer here is to hide the blue check and enjoy the free features. Thanks, Elon, for the freebie, but I don’t want to seem like a huckster creep!
