Another day, another bit of drama on X.
This time, yet again, it’s the old blue check marks in the spotlight. In the pre-Elon Musk era these had to be applied for, before the platform’s new owner swept in and started charging people $8 for them. Then everyone began making fun of people who paid, and finally X allowed those people to get the same Premium benefits but keep the blue check hidden to avoid ridicule.
And now? Yep, X is backtracking on that.
Elon Musk’s X pushed a fake headline about Iran attacking Israel. X’s AI chatbot Grok made it up.
“The hide your checkmark feature of X Premium is going away soon,” reads a notification screenshotted by Premium users. “Tap to manage your X premium features.”
Given that X recently starting handing out blue check marks to certain influential accounts for free (whether they wanted it or not) again, the timing of this update seems deliberate.
All in all, it hasn’t been a good couple of weeks for the social media platform. X recently began forcibly changing “Twitter” to “X” in URLs people were posting, which resulted in a number of those same URLs breaking. A study was also released that showed a rise in anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim hate speech on the platform. And a couple of weeks back, a report showed that use of X/Twitter is down by almost a quarter since Musk took charge.