Twitter abruptly scraps gray ‘Official’ verification badge within hours

Twitter’s solution to breaking its own verification system is beginning to roll out.

Several celebrity and publisher accounts now have a gray “official” check mark — in addition to the blue verified badge. News outlets, including Reuters, The New York Times, and Rolling Stone, are now double-badged, in addition to public figures, politicians, and other official brand accounts. Our @Verge handle is one of the accounts marked official, as of this writing, while Twitter’s reluctant new owner, Elon Musk, is not.

When Elon Musk announced that a Twitter Blue subscription would include a blue check for paying users, there were concerns about how people would distinguish between legitimate accounts and impersonations, which was the purpose of the blue check to begin with.

Twitter’s Esther Crawford said yesterday that the company would introduce a gray “official” label for verified real accounts. Not all blue check accounts have a gray badge yet, however, and it’s unclear whether all of them will add the tag.

Musk’s $7.99 per month Blue with verification is set to roll out sometime after the midterm elections, over concerns that the people who pay their way to verification could cause confusion if they impersonate politicians or news outlets. Musk has since said that users who impersonate others on the platform without clearly specifying the account is a “parody” will be “permanently suspended.” The Verge