The chaos over Twitter's new paid verified checkmarks, formerly used to confirm the legitimacy of specific profiles, has been growing with time. Over the weekend, Twitter gave verification status to an account called @DisneyJuniorUK, posing to be an official Disney Twitter handle. The account was tweeting vile content, but managed to be verified with a gold tick before being suspended, reported the BBC.
"This isn't actually real right. someone pinch me or something," wrote the owner alerting his followers. Since then the tweet has gone viral.
The account @DisneyJuniorUK was also given a gold badge which is reserved for organisations that pay $1,000 a month.
Meanwhile, Twitter has started restoring the blue tick badges, free of cost, to several accounts that have over one million followers after it removed the blue checks from multiple high-profile accounts across the world a few days ago.
Multiple celebrities across the world like Chadwick Boseman, Kobe Bryant, Michael Jackson, Shah Rukh Khan, Amitabh Bachchan, Sachin Tendulkar and Virat Kohli have got the blue tick back.
Interestingly, a few high-profile personalities like American author Stephen King, US professional basketball player LeBron James and legendary actor William Shatner did not lose their blue tick as Musk announced he was personally paying for their subscriptions.
After Musk took over as CEO of the company, he said he wanted to level the playing field on Twitter. It wasn't fair, he said, that Twitter alone got to decide which voices were more important than others.
In India, Twitter Blue is currently priced at Rs 900 per month on iOS and Android, and Rs 650 on the Web client. Twitter offers a discounted yearly plan of Rs 6,500, which boils down to around Rs 566 per month.
Musk had previously stated that the firm will eliminate all blue checks as it focuses on monetising its platform by charging users.