NEW ORLEANS — Blue Checks: Be gone. Your twitter feed is looking a lot different.
Twitter CEO Elon Musk has decided to start removing "verified" blue checkmarks from accounts that don’t pay eight dollars per month for Twitter Blue.
The 17-year-old platform has historically used the checks to show that the account users are seeing is truly the person or organization it claims to be.
Everyone from the Pope, to celebrities, to police departments, to your trusted WWL-TV reporters have seen their verified status taken away.
Now, according to a 2022 PEW Research study, only 27 percent of adults in the US use Twitter and 14 percent of US adults regularly get their news from there.
But how do you know what you’re seeing now is legit?
There’s a few kinds of checkmarks out there. Verified organizations, like WWL-TV and the Saints, for example, will have a gold checkmark and a square profile picture.
Grey checkmarks pop up for official government organizations or officials, such as The White House or the New Orleans Police Department.
But a lot of local elected officials and departments have no checkmarks by their name. That means we as journalists, and you, as a news consumer, will have to be more careful about tweets that appear to be from those accounts.
Mayor Cantrell, Attorney General Jeff Landry, the National Weather Service, Kenner Police and some local sheriff’s departments are just a few now stripped of their check marks. It makes them easier for another account to impersonate.
The short answer: if you see an important tweet from an unverified source, triple check.
Look for misspellings in the name, how recently the account was created, and whether it’s followed by verified organizations. The safer bet is to get your news somewhere else.
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