Twitter Made Its Old, New Verified Checkmarks Indistinguishable

Twitter's Blue and legacy checkmarks have become problematic for some users.

The popular microblogging platform recently implemented a new change that somewhat accomplishes its goal of retiring its legacy checkmarks to an extent.

The company previously announced it was removing legacy blue checkmarks on Apr. 1 while encouraging people and organizations who own them to subscribe to Twitter Blue to continue to hold their verified status on its platform.

Twitter Legacy Checkmark Issue

Twitter users with a legacy checkmark have been anticipating their removal since Dec. 2022, when Twitter CEO Elon Musk tweeted that the company would remove such checks "in a few months" due to them being acquired "in a corupt and nonsensical" manner.

Since then, legacy blue checkmark owners can see a pop-up when they look at the checkmarks, which notifies them that the account they have is a legacy-verified one and that it may or may not be notable, per an earlier Tech Crunch.

While Twitter previously mentioned that it would remove all legacy blue checkmarks on Apr. 1, it seems the company made a U-turn on that decision. Instead of removing them, Twitter changed the notification in the pop-up people see when checking a legacy checkmark, per Tech Crunch.

The pop-up now reads, "This account is verified because it's subscribed to Twitter Blue or is a legacy verified account." Thanks to this change, it is now impossible to differentiate between a legacy blue checkmark and a Twitter Blue verified checkmark.

Previously, the pop-up clearly notified people that an account was a legacy blue checkmark holder and that the account may or may not be notable. Meanwhile, those who were verified through Twitter's Blue verification service have a pop-up that says their account is verified because it's subscribed to Twitter Blue.

Mashable's Amanda Yeo mentioned in their report that the change Twitter made effectively stripped its whole verification system of "the last shred of meaning it still had."

Twitter's Reason Behind The U-Turn

Twitter's reason for not going through with its announcement is simple. According to The Washington Post's report, the company found that removing legacy blue tick badges is mostly a manual process involving verification data saved in a spreadsheet. This process means there may be no way of removing blue checkmarks from legacy accounts in bulk, as Twitter mentioned it would do in late March.

With Twitter laying off most of its employees over the past few months, it's also possible that it couldn't manually remove legacy badges in time for their Apr. 1 removal.

As such, instead of removing them as per plan, they changed the notification within the pop-up to say that the verified account is either subscribed to Twitter Blue or is a legacy verified account holder.

Many Twitter users didn't welcome this change, with some pointing out that the new notification could potentially give scammers and impersonators the guise of credibility.

Twitter has yet to address the change it made.