Twitter on Wednesday rolled out a gray “official” check mark next to some social media accounts to indicate that the social media company had verified their authenticity. Within hours, Elon Musk scrapped the plan.
“I just killed it,” the Tesla CEO and Twitter’s new owner said in reply to a comment by a noted technology blogger. “Blue check will be the great leveler.”
For a few hours on Friday morning, various accounts appeared with an “official” designation. Media sites like The Associated Press, The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal received an official designation, as did companies like Nike, Apple and Coca-Cola, along with the musician Taylor Swift, CBS Bay Area reported.
The two-tiered check mark system was designed to replace Twitter’s current “blue checks,” which signify an account’s authenticity. They’re intended to note that an account is verified, or that it really belongs to the person it claims to be. However, most Twitter users understand the blue check marks to be an indicator of importance or influence.
Musk said he changed his mind about having the two check marks after deciding it wouldn’t solve Twitter’s problem of a dual-class system.
“Apart from it being an aesthetic nightmare when looking at the Twitter feed… it was simply another way of creating a two-class system. It wasn’t addressing the core problem, [that] there were too many entities that were considered ‘official,'” he said on a conference call with advertisers on Wednesday.
