Elon Musk Pauses Twitter’s Blue Tick Relaunch After Impersonation Storm

Elon Musk announced on Tuesday that the relaunch of the ‘Blue Verified’ badge on Twitter will be temporarily suspended “until there is high confidence of stopping impersonation”.

After taking over the social media platform, Musk introduced the $8 blue tick verification plan but it resulted in the mushrooming of a lot of fake accounts.

“Holding off relaunch of Blue Verified until there is high confidence of stopping impersonation. Will probably use different color check for organizations than individuals,” Musk tweeted.

Musk had defended the much-criticised paid verification plan by saying that the blue checkmark will be the “great leveler”.

“Widespread verification will democratize journalism & empower the voice of the people,” he tweeted.

The plan backfired, however, when verified handles changed their user names to ‘Elon Musk’ to test the new Twitter owner who describes himself as a “free speech absolutist”. Thousands of such accounts were suspended, including that of comedian Kathy Griffin who had two million followers on the platform.

Musk recently ran a poll to reinstate the suspended account of former US President Donald Trump. Roughly 15 million people voted on Twitter which saw a narrow win for those who supported the move.