Twitter Is Planning an Additional Official Gray Tick For Users Along With Blue Tick

Because Twitter will only give the “blue tick” to paying customers in the future, there has been massive criticism, after all the tick is being misused and, so to speak, “purchasable”. Twitter now wants to solve the problem – with a gray tick.

Since Twitter was taken over by Elon Musk, the well-known “blue tick”, with which users, organizations, or companies can show that their identity has been verified and is generally considered relevant enough, should no longer be used in this way. Instead, Musk wants to equip all users who pay for the paid version of the service, called Twitter Blue, with it.

Twitter sells the verification hook and introduces a new hook

Because this caused a lot of criticism, also because the “blue tick” helps, for example, to recognize journalists and media as verified sources, Twitter now wants to introduce an alternative solution. In the future, a gray tick with the associated label “official” will indicate that the user’s identity has been checked.

It is no longer recognizable from every post whether the author or the company behind it is actually who or what he or she claims to be. But in the future, this can at least be found by looking at the profile page. Companies and people who pay for Twitter Blue can therefore basically have two ticks in the future – one blue and one gray.

In principle, the new, gray “official” tick is assigned regardless of whether an account owner pays for the “blue tick” that can be purchased with eight US dollars a month. Instead, Twitter wants to mark the majority of the accounts that have been identified as verified thanks to the “blue tick” with the “official” label – but not all of them.

As Twitter manager Esther Crawford announced in a tweet, not all accounts that have already been verified are automatically labeled as “official”. Instead, this labeling should only be used for Twitter accounts that are proven to belong to companies, governments and their employees, business partners, publishers, and major media, as well as to a limited extent certain public figures.

It is striking that the Twitter manager expressly did not speak of press representatives as candidates for the new label. Crawford said she and her team will continue to experiment with new ways of distinguishing different account types. More detailed information on the reasons for the introduction of the “official”