Twitter's legacy 'verified' checkmarks are going away in a few months

Now that the Twitter Blue subscription, along with the new “verified” checkmark, has been relaunched, Twitter and its CEO Elon Musk (is there anyone else left over there?) are after the old “legacy” checkmark.

If you own one of those, you may have noticed something odd. If you click on it, you’ll see a notice saying that “This is a legacy verified account. It may or may not be notable.” Fun fact: even Musk has one of those, meaning he himself may or may not be notable. Fair enough.

Twitter elaborates on this in a support document. A blue checkmark, the document says, may mean two different things: Either “the account has an active subscription to the new Twitter Blue subscription service and has met our eligibility criteria” or “the account was previously verified under the legacy verification criteria.”

Twitter’s new eligibility criteria, besides paying US$8 per month, includes an account being complete, with a display name, profile photo and confirmed phone number, active, older than 90 days, with no recent changes to profile photo, display name, or username. Furthermore, the account must have no signs of being “misleading or deceptive,” and it must have no signs of engaging in “platform manipulation and spam.”

So what’s going to happen with the old checkmarks? Twitter officially says it may “remove the checkmark of an account at any time without notice.” More precisely, Musk said that all legacy checkmarks will be removed “in a few months.”

“The way in which they were given out was corrupt and nonsensical,” he tweeted.

Notably, Twitter Blue is only available in the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the UK, meaning a large number of users can’t even get the new checkmark right now, though Twitter says it has “plans to expand.” Hopefully, Twitter will wait until the feature is available everywhere before it starts killing “legacy” checkmarks. Anything else would be nonsensical.