Why Twitter removed Blue Tick from Shah Rukh Khan and others' account

Twitter has decided that Blue Tick is no longer a mark to indicate the authenticity of an account. Instead, it's a badge awarded to users willing to pay a monthly fee to Twitter. And currently, only a few are paying. Accounts that no longer have the Blue Tick or any authentication badge list include Shah Rukh Khan, Virat Kohli, politicians, journalists and other celebrities who were "verified" on Twitter as of April 19.

Who all lost Twitter Blue Tick

Essentially, all Twitter users who were verified with the old system and didn't sign up for the Twitter Blue subscription before April 20 are finding their Blue Tick disappear from their profiles. Twitter removed "verified" badges from non-subscribers on April 1 from selected user profiles. One of the high-profile accounts that lost its Blue Tick before was the New York Times, allegedly on the direct order of Elon Musk. However, most users, including journalists, public figures, athletes, government officials, and movie stars, have lost verification badges.

There are only a few, and it needs to be clarified how many Twitter accounts still have the Blue Tick. Writer Stephen King and LeBron James use the most notable among these accounts. King and James had previously announced that they would never pay for Blue Tick. So what is going on? Elon Musk shared on Twitter that he is paying for Blue Tick on these two accounts. It's unclear why he's doing this, though people had speculated that this is some trolling because Elon Musk wants Twitter users to think that James and King are paying for Twitter Blue even when they refused to pay earlier.

Why did Twitter remove the blue ticks?

The question that arises now is - why? Various reasons, though it's unclear which is the key reason and which is just a bonus for Elon Musk.

Even before buying Twitter, Musk denounced the Blue Tick system. He accused the old Twitter address of elitist bias in account verification. He also said that the Blue Tick system had created two sections of Twitter users. So as soon as he acquired Twitter, Musk started selling Blue Tick. He said anyone can now buy the Blue Tick by paying a monthly fee of around $8.

But the Blue Tick on a payout didn't solve a problem Musk and his fanbase had with the Verified mechanism. Instead of two, he now drove three classes of users: those who got Blue Tick as a verification badge from the old Twitter management, those who bought Blue Tick from the new Twitter, and those who didn't have Blue Tick. He soon started a meme where people started making fun of users who paid for Twitter Blue and got a Blue Tick. Musk ordered a change to the messages about Blue Tick to confuse matters. Instead of identifying which users were paying for Blue Tick and which users got it as a verification badge, in early April, Twitter began displaying the below message:

"This account is verified because it's subscribed to Twitter Blue or is a legacy verified account."

Now it is clear that this was only temporary. Twitter is trying to increase its revenue, and one way it is trying to get more users to pay is by restricting the Blue Tick to paying users only. There were more than 4 lakh legacy verified users on Twitter. Elon Musk hopes that by taking away their Blue Ticks, he will likely turn most of them into users who would pay around $8, in India, between Rs 650-Rs 900, to get the coveted blue badge back from him.