Famous Twitter users like Celebrities, professional athletes and other high-profile users are once again being verified by the social media platform and they don’t seem too happy about it.
Twitter removed the blue marks last week from accounts that don’t pay a monthly fee. But the check marks mysteriously returned for many highly followed accounts over the weekend, leading some of them to disavow Elon Musk’s erratic changes to the platform.
Other high-profile accounts with more than 1 million followers also took to the platform to make it very clear they didn’t pay to get their blue check back.
Since last week, blue check marks also appeared on profiles of dead public figures, including author and chef Anthony Bourdain, who died in 2018; actor Chadwick Boseman, who died in 2020; and journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who was assassinated in 2018.
Legal experts have come out to warn Twitter about doling out subscriptions to people and institutions that didn’t want them, and implying that they paid for it could run afoul of the federal Lanham Act, which prohibits false advertising, as well as other regulations.
Writing by Tersoo Nicholas