Musk reveals purpose of new checkmark colors

Twitter CEO Elon Musk said on Friday that his long-promised verification system for paid subscribers would be “tentatively” rolled out next week. Musk has thus far struggled to introduce a working means of verifying Twitter’s user base.

“We’re tentatively launching Verified on Friday next week,” Musk wrote in a tweet, explaining that under the forthcoming system, individuals will receive a blue checkmark to denote their verified status, companies will receive a gold check, and government accounts will be marked with a gray tick.

Individuals affiliated with organizations will receive a badge showing this, provided the organization gives its approval, the billionaire added in a follow-up tweet.

Musk explained that all individual users will receive the same blue checkmark, whether they are celebrities or regular users, all of whom pay $8 per month for the mark and some added functionality on Twitter. 

“All verified accounts will be manually authenticated before [the] check activates,” Musk continued, calling this step “painful, but necessary.”

Musk has promised to overhaul Twitter’s often opaque process of verification since before he purchased the platform for $44 billion last month. By selling checkmarks to anyone willing to pay $8, he hoped to solve two problems: Twitter’s declining revenue and the proliferation of non-human ‘bot’ accounts.

However, he suspended the paid subscription service earlier this month when droves of newly verified users impersonated high-profile accounts – including US defense contractors and Musk’s own electric vehicle company, Tesla – to post misleading information. Musk had previously launched a separate “official” checkmark to distinguish noteworthy accounts, before announcing that he had “killed” the feature, only to reintroduce it for some accounts in the wake of the impersonations.

Musk said that he would provide a longer explanation of the new system next week.