Twitter blue checkmark purge causing mass confusion

Twitter has long been a way for people to keep track of tornado watches, train delays, news alerts or the latest crime warnings from their local police department.

But when the Elon Musk-owned platform started stripping blue verification check marks this week from accounts that don't pay a monthly fee, it left public agencies and other organizations around the world scrambling to figure out a way to show they're trustworthy and avoid impersonators.

One of the first fake accounts to be identified by FOX 5 News involved New York City. The imposter account claimed to be the official Twitter account for the city, but the city quickly responded by saying that it was not the real account.

The tense exchange between @nycgov and @NYC_GOVERNMENT occurred on Thursday, the date set by Elon Musk for the removal of legacy blue checkmarks, which were used to authenticate the accounts of people or organizations that could be easily faked. The only way to obtain the new checkmark is to pay $8 per month. 

The confusion comes as no surprise to Lance Ulanoff, US Editor and Chief for Tech Radar.

"That was not even remotely surprising. That's exactly what we expected to happen," he said. 

Other high-profile users who lost their blue checks Thursday included Beyoncé, Pope Francis, Oprah Winfrey and former President Donald Trump. But checks were also removed from accounts for major transit systems from San Francisco to Paris, national parks like Yosemite, official weather trackers and some elected officials.

Twitter had roughly 400,000 verified users under the original blue-check system. In the past, the checks meant that Twitter had verified that users were who they said they were.

While Twitter is now offering gold checks for "verified organizations" and gray checks for government organizations and their affiliates, it was not always clear why some accounts had them Friday and others did not.

TechRadar recommends checking the length of time that an account has been on Twitter and the number of followers as a quick way to identify authentic accounts. Users can also check for slight differences in the account handle, along with the number of followers.

A number of agencies said they were awaiting more clarity from Twitter, which has sharply curtailed its staff since Musk bought the San Francisco company for $44 billion last year. The confusion has raised concerns that Twitter could lose its status as a platform for getting accurate, up-to-date information from authentic sources, including in emergencies.

Fewer than 5% of legacy verified accounts appear to have paid to join Twitter Blue, according to an analysis by Travis Brown, a Berlin-based developer of software for tracking social media.

Musk’s move to end what he's called the "lords & peasants system for who has or doesn’t have a blue check mark" has riled up some high-profile users and pleased some right-wing figures and Musk fans who thought the marks were unfair. But it is not an obvious money-maker for the social media platform that has long relied on advertising for most of its revenue.

Promised for weeks, the mass removal of thousands of blue checks was paired with a surprise move to drop labels describing some media organizations as government-funded or state-affiliated. Musk at first defended a policy that lumped public radio and TV stations in the U.S. and other democracies with state-affiliated media in Russia and China, and then abruptly changed the language, but now Twitter has removed the labels entirely without explanation. The changes came after National Public Radio and other outlets have already stopped using Twitter.

While a few prominent users said they would stop using Twitter over blue checks, many public agencies appeared to be staying with the service.

Asked Friday about the German government’s continued use of Twitter, spokesperson Christiane Hoffmann said: "Of course we are watching very closely what’s happening on Twitter and we continually ask ourselves if it’s right to have channels there and how they should continue."

Hoffmann said the government was concerned about developments on Twitter in recent weeks and months, adding that the ministries, spokespeople and Chancellor Olaf Scholz now have gray ticks "for which nothing is paid."

City officials in Minneapolis applied about three weeks ago for a gray check on the city’s main Twitter account and received approval for it Thursday.

Jordan Gilgenbach, the city's digital communications coordinator, said he’s planning to seek the same for other city-run accounts including the health department — which had no check mark as of Friday — but said Twitter’s system of assessing and deciding which accounts qualify "has never really been clear."

"From an active shooter situation or a weather-related event, or even the more routine stuff like snowstorms, it’s always a challenge even with verification to combat misinformation and rumors," Gilgenbach said. "This is just going to make that harder."

With the Associated Press.