Twitter has renewed the option to buy blue checkmarks

One month after the company was forced to pull the feature due to a wave of “verified” accounts pretending to be brands and high-profile users, Twitter relaunched the option for users who pay for its subscription service to receive a coveted “blue check” on Monday.

The new verification system, which adds multiple new colors to check mark options, is part of Elon Musk’s plan to grow the company’s subscription business and improve its bottom line. He bought the company for $44 billion, which included a lot of debt financing.

Esther Crawford, the Twitter product head in charge of the subscription service effort, tweeted that the new Twitter Blue subscription service will cost $8 per month for users who subscribe via the web platform and $11 per month for iOS app subscribers. It would appear that the higher iOS price point is an effort to cover Apple’s 30% app transaction fee, which Musk has recently lashed out at.

Twitter will provide gold checks for businesses, gray checks for government agencies and other organizations, and blue checks for individuals, celebrities included or not, as part of the new verification system. On The New York Times and Taco Bell’s respective accounts, the gold business verification check mark began to appear on Monday. The option to subscribe to Twitter Blue was reinstated later on Monday.

Musk has previously suggested that individuals who were verified under the previous system due to their status as journalists, celebrities, or public figures would have their checks revoked if they did not pay for Twitter’s new subscription service. He announced via Twitter on Monday that “all legacy blue checks” would be phased out “in a few months.”

When some Twitter users click on the blue checks of accounts that were verified prior to Musk’s takeover, they are beginning to see a new explanation that reads: This is an inheritance confirmed account. It might or might not be noteworthy.

Musk has also stated that all verified accounts would be “manually authenticated” prior to their checkmark being approved by Twitter, which has cut more than half of its staff and lost many others to attrition. If verified users change their account names, the company will also temporarily remove check marks pending authentication. Beyond confirming that users have a working phone number, the nature of that authentication process is unknown. In a tweet, Crawford stated: In this update, we don’t have ID verification.

According to the company, users of the new Twitter Blue will eventually also see their tweets appear first in replies, mentions, and searches; see half as many advertisements; be able to upload longer videos, and

The new system’s relaunch was initially scheduled for the end of November, according to Musk, but it was repeatedly postponed due to safety concerns.

As a means of leveling the playing field, the billionaire Twitter owner has advocated for the capability to pay for verification. However, such an option also carries the risk of undermining the original goal of verification, which was to provide users with the assurance that they can trust information shared by well-known individuals.

Musk ran the risk of further alienating many of the advertisers that still make up the vast majority of the company’s sales by attempting to use the paid verification option to increase subscription revenue. Major brands like Nintendo of America and Eli Lilly were impersonated within hours of the paid verification option’s launch last month.

The additional gold and gray verification categories appear to be designed to address some of these issues; however, it is unclear how trust in prominent individual users would be affected by individuals having to pay to be verified.

“All verified individual humans will have same blue check, as boundary of what constitutes ‘notable’ is otherwise too subjective,” Musk tweeted last month. “Individuals can have secondary tiny logo showing they belong to an org if verified as such by that org.”