CHICAGO (AP) \u2014 Twitter has long been a way for people to keep track of tornado watches, train delays, news alerts or the latest crime warnings from their local police department.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But when the Elon Musk-owned platform started\u00a0stripping blue verification check marks\u00a0this week from accounts that don\u2019t pay a monthly fee, it left public agencies and other organizations around the world scrambling to figure out a way to show they\u2019re trustworthy and avoid impersonators.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
High-profile users who lost their blue checks Thursday included Beyonc\u00e9, Pope Francis, Oprah Winfrey and former President Donald Trump. But checks were also removed from accounts for major transit systems from San Francisco to Paris, national parks like Yosemite, official weather trackers and some elected officials.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Twitter had roughly 400,000 verified users under the original blue-check system. In the past, the checks meant that Twitter had verified that users were who they said they were.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
While Twitter is now offering gold checks for \u201cverified organizations\u201d and gray checks for government organizations and their affiliates, it was not always clear why some accounts had them Friday and others did not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Fake accounts claiming to represent Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, the city\u2019s Department of Transportation and the Illinois Department of Transportation all began sharing messages early Friday falsely claiming that Chicago\u2019s Lake Shore Drive \u2014 a major thoroughfare \u2014 would close to private traffic starting next month.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A critical eye could spot obvious hints of the fraud. The account handles are slightly different from the authentic ones representing Lightfoot and the transportation agencies. The fakes also had far fewer followers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But the fakes used the same photos, biographical text and home page links as the real ones.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The genuine accounts for Lightfoot and the transportation agencies did not have a blue or gray check mark as of Friday. Lightfoot\u2019s office said the city is aware of the fake accounts and \u201cworking with Twitter to resolve this matter.\u201d At least one was suspended Friday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A number of agencies said they were awaiting more clarity from Twitter, which has sharply curtailed its\u00a0staff since Musk bought the San Francisco company\u00a0for $44 billion last year. The confusion has raised concerns that Twitter could lose its status as a platform for getting accurate, up-to-date information from authentic sources, including in emergencies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As a tornado was about to strike central New Jersey earlier this month, a go-to account for information was run by the National Weather Service branch in Mount Holly, New Jersey. It had a blue check at the time. It no longer has any check, though the main NWS account and some other regional branches now sport a gray check marking them as official accounts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Susan Buchanan, director of public affairs for the weather service, said the agency is in the process of applying to get the gray check mark for government agencies. She declined to answer why some regional NWS branches lost their marks and others have them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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. But the meaning of the blue check has changed to symbolize that the user bought a premium account that can help their tweets be seen by more people. It also includes other features such as the ability to edit tweets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIt essentially becomes a system where those with the most ability to economically participate in this pay-to-play system essentially rise to the top,\u201d said Brooke Erin Duffy, a professor at Cornell University who studies social media.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She added that while there\u2019s been a lot of debate about what algorithmic curation means for how people see information on social media \u2014 versus a simple chronological timeline \u2014 Twitter\u2019s blue check system introduces a third category of \u201ceconomic curation.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The removal of the old verification system, Duffy said, \u201cessentially dismantles these journalistic ideals of legitimacy and authority, but at the same time reinforces Twitter\u2019s status as a pay-to-play platform.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Facebook parent Meta also recently introduced a paid verification system aimed at content creators, influencers and other high profile accounts, which Duffy said will have a similar \u201cpay-to-play\u201d effect on what users see in their timeline as Twitter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Celebrity users, from basketball star LeBron James to author Stephen King and Star Trek\u2019s William Shatner, have balked at joining \u2014 although all three still had blue checks on Friday after Musk said he paid for them himself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For users who still had a blue check, a popup message indicated that the account \u201cis verified because they are subscribed to Twitter Blue and verified their phone number.\u201d Verifying a phone number simply means that the person has a phone number and they verified that they have access to it \u2014 it does not confirm the person\u2019s identity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Fewer than 5% of legacy verified accounts appear to have paid to join Twitter Blue, according to an analysis by Travis Brown, a Berlin-based developer of software for tracking social media.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Musk\u2019s move to end what he\u2019s called the \u201clords & peasants system for who has or doesn\u2019t have a blue check mark\u201d has riled up some high-profile users and pleased some right-wing figures and Musk fans who thought the marks were unfair. But it is not an obvious money-maker for the social media platform that has long relied on advertising for most of its revenue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Promised for weeks, the mass removal of thousands of blue checks was paired with a surprise move to drop labels describing some media organizations as government-funded or state-affiliated. Musk at first defended a policy that lumped public radio and TV stations in the U.S. and other democracies with state-affiliated media in Russia and China, and then abruptly changed the language, but now Twitter has removed the labels entirely without explanation. The changes came\u00a0after National Public Radio\u00a0and\u00a0other outlets\u00a0have already stopped using Twitter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
While a few prominent users said they would stop using Twitter over blue checks, many public agencies appeared to be staying with the service.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Asked Friday about the German government\u2019s continued use of Twitter, spokesperson Christiane Hoffmann said: \u201cOf course we are watching very closely what\u2019s happening on Twitter and we continually ask ourselves if it\u2019s right to have channels there and how they should continue.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Hoffmann said the government was concerned about developments on Twitter in recent weeks and months, adding that the ministries, spokespeople and Chancellor Olaf Scholz now have gray ticks \u201cfor which nothing is paid.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
City officials in Minneapolis applied about three weeks ago for a gray check on the city\u2019s main Twitter account and received approval for it Thursday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Jordan Gilgenbach, the city\u2019s digital communications coordinator, said he\u2019s planning to seek the same for other city-run accounts including the health department \u2014 which had no check mark as of Friday \u2014 but said Twitter\u2019s system of assessing and deciding which accounts qualify \u201chas never really been clear.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cFrom an active shooter situation or a weather-related event, or even the more routine stuff like snowstorms, it\u2019s always a challenge even with verification to combat misinformation and rumors,\u201d Gilgenbach said. \u201cThis is just going to make that harder.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
CHICAGO (AP) \u2014 Twitter has long been a way for people t […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2451,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2450","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.viewworld.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2450","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.viewworld.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.viewworld.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.viewworld.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.viewworld.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2450"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.viewworld.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2450\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2452,"href":"https:\/\/www.viewworld.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2450\/revisions\/2452"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.viewworld.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2451"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.viewworld.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2450"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.viewworld.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2450"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.viewworld.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2450"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}