April’s Fool? The Twitter blister apocalypse that wasn’t

Without the weight behind the authentication symbol that the blue check provided, any Twitter user could hypothetically pay to impersonate a public figure or company.

In the days leading up to Saturday’s supposed blue check apocalypse, legacy accounts were confirmed LeBron James to Monica Lewinsky tweeted against the new policy.

Major news organizations, including the New York Times, Washington Post and CNN, announced this week that they would not pay employees to maintain blue check status. The White House sent an email to staff informing them that it would not be paying for Twitter Blue.

Former vice president of global commerce and media at Twitter, Nathan Hubbard, tweeted Friday that phasing out verification was a “risky” policy change and that“If most OG blue checks stop tweeting in protest at being asked to pay to create the content that Twitter lives off of… Twitter dies.”

After earlier tweet it “Social media with a paid account will be the only social media that matters,” Musk was noticeably quiet Saturday about the lack of noticeable change in the app’s interface, only retweet an ad first posted by Tesla’s company account and a old image of himself with the caption “Me after 1 day without eating sugar”.

Twitter’s communications office was unavailable for comment.

And from 12.00 on April Fool’s Day the previously confirmed blue checks remained.