Twitter begins removing blue checks from high-profile users

Twitter's high-profile users are losing the blue check marks that helped verify their identity and distinguish them from impostors on the Elon Musk-owned social media platform.

This time it’s for real.

Many of Twitter’s high-profile users are losing the blue check marks that helped verify their identity and distinguish them from impostors on the Elon Musk-owned social media platform.

After several false starts, Twitter began making good on its promise Thursday to remove the blue checks from accounts that don’t pay a monthly fee to keep them. Twitter had about 300,000 verified users under the original blue-check system — many of them journalists, athletes and public figures. The checks began disappearing from these users’ profiles late morning Pacific Time.

High-profile users who lost their blue checks Thursday included Beyonce, Pope Francis and former President Donald Trump.

The costs of keeping the marks range from $8 a month for individual web users to a starting price of $1,000 monthly to verify an organization, plus $50 monthly for each affiliate or employee account. Twitter does not verify the individual accounts to ensure they are who they say they are, as was the case with the previous blue check doled out during the platform’s pre-Musk administration.

Celebrity users, from basketball star LeBron James to Star Trek’s William Shatner, have balked at joining — although on Thursday, James’s blue check indicated that the account paid for verification. Seinfeld actor Jason Alexander pledged to leave the platform if Musk takes his blue check away.

“The way Twitter is going anyone could be me now. The verification system is an absolute mess,” Dionne Warwick tweeted Tuesday. She had earlier vowed not to pay for Twitter Blue, saying the monthly fee “could (and will) be going toward my extra hot lattes.”

On Thursday, Warwick lost her blue check.