Pay up or lose your Twitter blue tick as Elon Musk sets new deadline

Managing Twitter is proving to be a tough nut to crack for its CEO, Elon Musk. He has been changing Twitter policies and implementing new orders every week.

He has again set the final date for removing legacy blue ticks from the platform. In a tweet posted on Thursday, Musk said that the legacy blue ticks will disappear on April 20.

"Final date for removing legacy Blue checks is 4/20," he tweeted. Musk had said that Twitter would start removing the verified check mark from accounts that refuse to pay for the service starting April 1, yes, on April Fools Day.

"On April 1st, we will begin winding down our legacy verified program and removing legacy verified checkmarks," Twitter Verified wrote. But the decision was not implemented, and all the legacy verified accounts still have their badges.

Musk then went on to claim that he would be giving a few weeks' grace period to legacy verified accounts and would remove the blue ticks if they still refused to pay for the service. But he later deleted the tweet.

Before Musk's takeover of Twitter, a blue tick was used as a verification tool and was perceived as a badge of authenticity. However, Musk changed that too. Now anyone can get a blue tick if they are willing to pay for it. The Twitter Blue subscription costs $8 a month and comes with several perks.

Like most of his tweets, the one about the new date for the eventual removal of the legacy blue ticks also garnered critical reactions from Twitter users. Several users pointed out that April 20 is Adolf Hitler's birthday, while others highlighted that the date 4/20 is associated with drug use.

"It's telling when you can't figure out if Elon Musk picked 4/20 to either celebrate Hitler's birthday or because it's National Weed Day. TBH the tragically unfunny Musk probably did it for both," a Twitter user wrote.

Some of the users did not shy away from mocking his management capabilities. "Of course, Musk chose 4/20 to remove the blue checkmarks because he turned this entire website and its reputation into just like him, a complete joke," wrote one user.

"Funnily enough, Elon Musk's score for his running of Twitter is also 4/20," said another. "Eh, sounds like this guy does NOT know how to run a social media platform," added a user.

The move to let people get a blue tick for a certain amount has people worried as some might impersonate prominent people and organisations to create confusion and chaos. Trolls have already begun changing their profile photos and names to mimic celebrities and politicians.

In fact, a number of accounts impersonated influential individuals soon after the launch of the paid subscription service in November.

The development led to utter chaos on the platform after fake accounts of Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg, current and former US Presidents Joe Biden, Donald Trump, and George W. Bush, and former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair cropped up on Twitter.

Twitter had to suspend all of them to bring the situation under control. One such account impersonated US pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly and tweeted that the company had made insulin free.

Eli Lilly had to issue a clarification after its stock price fell due to the fake tweet. Its stock price plummeted to $352.30 from $368.72 within hours after the parody account sent out the tweet.

Musk has since been trying to make the subscription model as perfect as he can, but he has not succeeded so far. It remains to be seen how he will deal with the situation so people will be able to distinguish between legitimate and fake accounts.