KARACHI: It was an eerie feeling seeing the Twitter accounts of notable personalities, government organisations and multinational companies without a blue checkmark of authority following their name.

The move to remove the check marks has once again stoked misinformation concerns, which some experts say were never fully addressed.

The mark had come to be known as a symbol of trustworthiness. It separated, at least in essence, genuine from fake, real from a spoof and truth from lies.

On Thursday, Twitter began stripping legacy verified accounts – those who had got the blue check long before Elon Musk planned to buy Twitter.

No one was spared from the purge. Pope Francis, Donald Trump, Justin Bieber, Imran Khan, Cristiano Ronaldo, all are without the marks that distinguished them from their parodies. While most celebrities tweeted, some jokingly, about losing their tick marks, some strangely managed to keep their blue mark, despite not signing up for it.

Musk said in response to a news article about those check marks that he was “paying for a few personally.” In response to another tweet, he said it was only for Star Trek’s William Shatner, basketball superstar LeBron James and author Stephen King.

Misinformation concerns

A fake account subscribed to Twitter Blue claiming to represent Rapid Support Forces, a paramilitary group fighting for control of Sudan, has falsely claimed its leader has died in the fighting, Vice News reported.

The tweet from the fake @RSFSudann account claiming to represent the Rapid Support Forces does have a verified blue tick, but the actual RSF account, @RSFSudan, does not.

The fake tweet, already viewed over one million times, wrongly claimed that RSF leader Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo had died from injuries sustained in combat.

This was similar to the outcome in 2022 when Mr Musk opened the verification for anyone who could pay and several parody accounts popped up, creating quite a stir. The most headline-grabbing stuff was pulled off by the impostor account of the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly — with a check mark — when it tweeted that it would provide free insulin to the customers. The company’s stocks plummeted before the damage could be salvaged.

Media labels gone

The removals followed spats between Twitter and various news organisations that have objected to labels appended to their accounts indicating they were “state-affiliated” or “government funded.” But those too had disappeared from many high-profile media accounts, according to a review by AFP.

It was not clear why the labels were removed, but the change was praised in some quarters. “I support Twitter’s removal of all ‘State-affiliated media’ labels,” tweeted Hu Xijin, the former editor of Chinese state tabloid Global Times who rose to prominence as a voice of nationalism.

Published in Dawn, April 22nd, 2023