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Celebrities, sportspersons, economists and politicians were among a wide cross-section of users who lost the coveted blue checkmarks on Twitter on Friday. The social media platform revoked its legacy checkmarks, introduced back in 2009 as a means of verifying official handles and distinguishing them from parody accounts.
Film personalities such as Amitabh Bachchan, Shah Rukh Khan, Salman Khan, Rajinikanth, AR Rahman, Deepika Padukone, Alia Bhatt and Rashmika Mandanna faced the blue tick purge. Ditto sports persons such as Virat Kohli, MS Dhoni and Sachin Tendulkar. Official handles of politicians such as Yogi Adityanath, Arvind Kejriwal, Rahul Gandhi and Mamata Banerjee were also devoid of the blue checkmarks.
Twitter accounts of top business leaders such as Ratan Tata, Uday Kotak and Rishad Premji, too, were seen without the blue checkmarks. However corporate chieftains such as Anand Mahindra, Kiran Mazumdar Shaw and Harsh Goenka retained their verified status because they subscribed to the Twitter blue service in a timely manner.
But not all those who subscribed managed to retain their verified status. Actor Amitabh Bachchan in a humorous tweet asked the social media website to restore his blue tick since he had already paid for the Twitter blue subscription. Hashtags such as #BlueTick and #ElonMusk were trending on Friday morning as Twitterverse transitioned to a subscription-based verification process.
‘Embarassing’
Former Chief Economist of World Bank, Kaushik Basu, tweeted that it would be embarrassing to now have a blue tick because it is a signal that the user paid for it. “Here is the economics of Twitter blue ticks in one tweet: Cornell’s degrees are very valuable. People are willing to pay for it. If Cornell decides that it will now sell all its degrees for a price, the market price of Cornell degree will quickly fall to zero,” he tweeted.
Tendulkar, who did an AMA (ask me anything) session on Friday on Twitter, was asked by a user how he could be sure if he was the real Sachin, since there was no blue tick. Promptly, the cricketer posted a picture of himself in a blue shirt, shaping his hands in the form of a bluetick and said, “As of now this is my blue tick verification!”
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