Saturday was the last day to pay for blue checkmarks, but they are still there, with a new warning.

Elon Musk had said that he would take away the blue checkmarks that were given to celebrities, athletes, business leaders, authors, and journalists on Twitter if they didn't start paying for a monthly subscription to the social media service.

Musk's goal was to turn the ad-based platform he bought for $44 billion last year into a pay-to-play model, which might have made him upset with some enemies and other elites.

But the Saturday deadline passed and the blue checks are still there, many with a new disclaimer explaining they might have been paid for or they might not have been paid for — nobody but Twitter knows. Monday, the Associated Press asked the company to explain why its policies were changing, but it didn't answer.

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Blue checkmark or "scarlet letter?"

Matt Darling has been on Twitter for about 15 years. He has never cared about not having a blue check, but he liked it when a verified account with "some real-world importance" started following him.

People joke on Twitter that blue checks are for the aristocracy, but I don't think anyone, except Musk, actually thought that. Darling said

After paying $11 last month to try out some of the features that come with a Twitter Blue subscription, Darling finally got a blue check. But Musk used a way to get rid of the blue tick because he thought it was becoming more of a "scarlet letter" than a sign of credibility.

"Now it's a sign that you don't make good tweets, so you have to pay for engagement," said Darling, an economist at the Niskanen Center, which is on the right side of the political spectrum.

Musk has said that as of April 15, only verified accounts will be shown in Twitter's "For You" feed, which suggests tweets to people. Darling wants to cancel the subscription because it had too many problems and he doesn't want more online influence.


"I don't want to have to pay to use Twitter. I want it to be a place where people whose tweets are interesting get a lot of attention," he said.


Hybrid model

Instead of taking away the blue checkmarks, Twitter started adding a new message to profiles on Sunday: "This account is verified because it's subscribed to Twitter blue or is a legacy verified account."

So, verified users with a lot of fame, like the singer Dionne Warwick, still have their blue checks. But so does everyone who pays between $8 and $11 a month for a Twitter Blue subscription, and there's no way to tell the difference. (Warwick made it clear that she won't pay for a blue check because that money will "go towards my extra hot lattes.")


Star Trek actor William Shatner was happy with this hybrid solution. He had been hesitant to sign up for a subscription at first, but he told Elon Musk on Sunday, "I can live with this." This is a good middle ground." But it's not clear if this is a short-term or long-term fix.

Over the weekend, Twitter did remove a verified check from at least one account: the main account of the New York Times newspaper. 

The account, which has 55 million followers, used to have a gold check next to it to show that it was a verified business.

But over the weekend, a user told Musk that the newspaper had publicly said it wouldn't pay a monthly fee for checkmark status. In response, Musk said he would remove the mark and criticized the newspaper's reporting.

SOURCE: NEWS AGENCIES