The move comes after Elon Musk, who owns Twitter, said bad things about the newspaper.

Twitter has taken away the verification check mark from the main account of The New York Times, which is one of the news organizations that Twitter CEO Elon Musk hates the most.


Many of Twitter's most popular users are getting ready for the loss of the blue check marks that helped confirm their identities and set them apart from fake accounts on the social media site.

Musk, who owns Twitter, told verified users that they have until Saturday to buy a premium Twitter subscription or lose their checks. In a story published Thursday, the Times said that it would not pay Twitter to verify its institutional accounts.


Musk tweeted early on Sunday that the Times' check mark would be taken away. Later, he posted bad things about the newspaper, which has been very active on Twitter and has written a lot about problems with partially automated driving systems at Tesla, an electric car company that Musk also runs.


Other Times accounts, like its business news and opinion pages, still had blue or gold check marks as of Sunday, as did many reporters for the news organization.


In a statement Sunday, the Times said, "We don't plan to pay the monthly fee for check mark status for our institutional Twitter accounts." "We also won't pay reporters for Twitter Blue for their personal accounts, unless this status is absolutely necessary for reporting," the newspaper said.

Even though the Associated Press has also said it won't pay for the check marks, they were still showing up on its accounts as of Sunday at noon.


The Associated Press emailed Twitter with questions about why The New York Times check mark was taken away, but Twitter did not answer.


Costs for keeping the check marks range from $8 per month for an individual web user to a starting price of $1,000 per month to verify an organization, plus $50 per month for each affiliate or employee account. Twitter doesn't check each user's account to make sure they are who they say they are, like it used to do with the blue check that was given to public figures and others before Musk took over.


While the cost of Twitter Blue subscriptions might seem like nothing for Twitter’s most famous commentators, celebrity users from basketball star LeBron James to Star Trek’s William Shatner have baulked at joining. Jason Alexander, who played George Costanza on the American TV show Seinfeld, said he would leave the platform if Musk took away his blue check.

A memo to staff says that the White House will also not sign up for premium accounts. Even though Twitter gave President Joe Biden and his cabinet a free grey mark, lower-level staff won't be able to use Twitter Blue unless they pay for it themselves.

If you see impersonations that you believe violate Twitter’s stated impersonation policies, alert Twitter using Twitter’s public impersonation portal,” said the staff memo from White House official Rob Flaherty.


Alexander, the actor, said that there are bigger problems in the world, but "anyone can claim to be me" without the blue mark.

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Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion in October of last year. Since then, he has been trying to get more people to pay for a premium subscription so that Twitter can make more money. But his move also shows that he thinks the blue verification marks have become a sign of undeserved or "corrupt" status for celebrities, news reporters, and other people who were given free verification by Twitter's previous leadership.

Along with protecting celebrities from impersonators, one of the main reasons Twitter started putting a blue check mark on profiles about 14 years ago was to verify politicians, activists, and people who were suddenly in the news, as well as little-known journalists at small publications around the world, as an extra way to stop fake accounts from spreading false information. Most "legacy blue checks" were never meant to be well-known brands.


After Musk took over Twitter, one of the first things he did was start a service that gave blue checks to anyone who paid $8 a month. But it was quickly taken over by fake accounts pretending to be Nintendo, the drug company Eli Lilly, and Musk's companies Tesla and SpaceX. Twitter had to temporarily stop the service a few days after it was released.

The new service costs $8 a month for people who use it on the web and $11 a month for people who use its apps for the iPhone or Android. Subscribers should see less advertising, be able to post longer videos, and have more of their tweets shown.

SOURCE: NEWS AGENCIES