Social media company X, formerly Twitter, now lets paid users hide their verification checkmarks. The Elon Musk-owned company introduced paid verification last year with the Twitter Blue relaunch. The service was renamed to XBlue during the ongoing rebranding exercise.
The company has updated the help page for paid subscriptions, which is titled “About Twitter Blue,” saying that even if you hide the checkmark it might be visible in some places. The company didn’t give any further details about those placeholders.
“As a subscriber, you can choose to hide your checkmark on your account. The check mark will be hidden on your profile and posts. The checkmark may still appear in some places and some features could still reveal you have an active subscription. Some features may not be available while your checkmark is hidden. We will continue to evolve this feature to make it better for you,” the page reads.
This will supposedly help users benefit from subscription features without showing that they are a verified account. The option to hide the checkmark will show up in the “Profile customization” section of account settings.
In March, app reverse engineer Alessandro Paluzzi noted that Twitter is working on a feature to hide checkmarks with ID verification.
#Twitter keeps working on the ability to control everything related to account verification and identity by adding the option to show or hide your blue checkmark on your profile 👀 pic.twitter.com/6uTjBON21N
— Alessandro Paluzzi (@alex193a) March 21, 2023
There was a lot of uproar about paid verification as it was hard to distinguish between legacy-verified accounts of notable people and users who had paid for the checkmark.
In April, Twitter removed legacy checkmarks, but later it reinstated the checkmark for top accounts — even if they didn’t pay for it.
Since the relaunch, the company has introduced features like a 10,000-character limit for posts, a three-hour video upload limit, fewer ads on the timeline and, most recently, ad revenue sharing for subscribed users in order to incentivize people to post more on the platform. In May, the platform also enabled features like encrypted DMs for verified users.
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