Twitter has removed its legacy checkmarks of accounts without a Twitter Blue subscription. Several celebrities also opted out of the subscription service and lost their checkmark for a while, including cricketer Sachin Tendulkar, Virat Kohli, and Bollywood actor, Shah Rukh Khan. Elon Musk recently revealed that he was paying for such celebrities, which now appears like the blue tick is back to those who have millions of followers.  

Nevertheless, the microblogging platform is mandating advertisers on the platform to pay for their verification or reach a minimum monthly spend on ads. According to a TechCrunch report, several Twitterati, including social media analyst, Matt Navarra, have shared screenshots of emails from Twitter that stated that starting April 21, 2023, verified checkmarks are required to continue running ads on the platform.

This probably eliminates accounts with a grey checkmark reserved for official government and related accounts, TechCrunch noted in its report.

“Business accounts spending in excess of $1,000 per month already have gold checks or will soon, and they’ll continue to enjoy access to advertising without interruption at this time,” the email read. The change will align with the platform’s broader verification strategy to elevate the content quality and enhance the experience of users and advertisers. It stated that users would have a more visible organic presence and a broader range of creation tools.

Twitter chief Elon Musk recently threatened to take legal action against Microsoft over the claims that the company “trained illegally using Twitter data.” This came in response to a tweet that Microsoft’s advertising platform would stop supporting Twitter due to the latter’s changes requiring payment to access its API.

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