Twitter may be working on a feature that lets you hide the blue checkmark you got by paying for its Blue subscription. A screen found by app researcher Alessandro Paluzzi shows that the company is working on a control panel for verification settings, with one of the options being “Show or hide your blue checkmark on your profile.”
This report should definitely be taken with a grain of salt, given that it appears to be an in-development feature that Twitter hasn’t announced (and that the company’s taking a long time to ship things it has said are coming). However, I can see why Twitter might want to add it. Depending on what part of the site you’re on, the blue verified checkmark can make you as much of a pariah as having an NFT profile picture. If a tweet from a Twitter Blue user goes viral, the comments are likely filled with memes about how “this mf paid for twitter,” and there are even tools to block everyone who has the subscription.
Soon, the blue checkmark may become an even more glaring indicator of your subscription status — at the moment, having it means that you either pay for Blue or that you were verified through the legacy verification program, and it takes a few clicks to figure out which is the case. However, Twitter has said it’ll start getting rid of those come April. If that happens, the ambiguity will be gone — blue checks will mean Blue subscriptions.
While Twitter owner and CEO Elon Musk pitched Blue’s inclusion of a checkmark as bringing “power to the people” (at least the people willing to pay $7 to 11 a month for the subscription), the service does come with features that even people who don’t care about verification might find appealing. It lets you post longer videos and tweets or edit mistakes out of your existing posts. The company has also promised that it’ll prioritize your posts over other people’s and that it’ll cut down on the number of ads you see, though those features aren’t available yet.
