Users with big followings will receive a free subscription to X, formerly Twitter — and the platform’s famous blue check, the company said in a reversed policy.
This week, X users with large followings were surprised to see that their blue checks — which they had earned under then-Twitter’s previous verification system and lost when Musk purged them for all but paying users, had suddenly reappeared.
The reappearing blue checks came after Musk posted last week that, “X accounts with over 2500 verified subscriber followers will get Premium features for free and accounts with over 5000 will get Premium+ for free.”
This means that prominent users would receive their blue checks back, without having to pay around $11 a month for the platform’s subscription service.
The move is a reversal of one of the biggest changes Musk made when he took over Twitter.
Before Musk, the blue check mark was used as a verification system for major accounts including celebrities, institutions and journalists.
But Musk saw the system as unfair to regular users and overhauled the blue checks so that they went only to paying subscribers, which meant thousands of holders were stripped of the feature.
Late Wednesday, some users were surprised and even angry to find the blue tick reinstated.
A message from the platform explained that they were given free subscriptions because they were an “influential member” of X.
The site added that it “reserves the right to cancel the complimentary subscription in its sole discretion.”
Premium or Premium+ perks include reduced ads and higher placement in the platform’s feeds, as well as access to Grok, X’s AI chatbot.
Some users who received the blue check saw it as a bid by Musk to revitalize the struggling platform.
“Translation: Pay $8? Kidding. Help me. But don’t say anything too free speechy about me or my Garbage Tower of Babel,” actor Jeffrey Wright, who received an unsolicited check, said in a post on X.
Since Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion in 2022, the platform’s advertising business has collapsed as marketers soured on his leadership and the mass firings at the company that gutted content moderation.
X named company veteran Kylie McRoberts on Tuesday as the new head of safety in an effort to shore up income from advertising, still the site’s main source of revenue.
According to most industry-accepted metrics, X has lost users since Musk took ownership, but the company says activity on the site has grown.
With this development, it is now evident that one of the world’s richest men is back to being okay with a tiered system — he’ll be giving away blue checks to prominent users, but still offering the rest of us plebeians the option to buy one.
The return of the free blue check may be a sign that the blue check subscription business hasn’t panned out the way that Musk hoped.
However, tt may not be entirely Musk’s fault, it is historically difficult to get internet users on any platform to pay for a service or feature they previously got for free.
