Have you paid Elon Musk for an $8-per-month subscription to Twitter Blue (now called X Blue, under Musk’s rebranding effort) but are embarrassed to advertise the fact?
X now lets subscribers to the premium X Blue service hide the blue check mark on their account. Musk has promoted the perk as democratizing Twitter’s most recognizable status symbol. He tweeted last fall that “There shouldn’t be a different standard for celebrities”when it comes to verified status, and Musk complained that Twitter’s previous process of doling out blue check marks was “corrupt” and “nonsensical.”
But X/Twitter now recognizes that a number of customers wish to disable the blue check mark… for whatever reason.
“As a subscriber, you can choose to hide your checkmark on your account. The checkmark will be hidden on your profile and posts,” the company says in an update on its X Blue page. However, it adds, “The checkmark may still appear in some places and some features could still reveal you have an active subscription” and says “some features may not be available while your checkmark is hidden.”
In April 2023, the company temporarily deactivated Twitter blue check marks from many celebrities who weren’t paying the $8 monthly fee, including Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, Kim Kardashian, Jennifer Lopez and Oprah. After the move apparently failed to yield in a significant number of new paying subscribers, the social network did an about-face just a few days later and reinstated the badge for those accounts and others with large followings — including on accounts of famous people who have died.
X Blue’s other benefits include the ability to edit a post within a one-hour window; a 50% reduction in ads; “prioritized rankings” of a user’s posts in conversations and search; the ability to post up to 25,000 characters (vs. the 280-character limit); and the ability to upload videos up to 3 hours long or up to 8 gigabytes in size. Musk says Blue subscribers also will be eligible to receive a share of advertising revenue, initially based on ads displayed in replies to their posts.
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