Revoked

Twitter Spent Thirteen Years Using a Blue Check to Confirm Accounts Were Who They Said They Were. The Day After It Started Selling the Check for $8 a Month, a Verified Eli Lilly Announced That Insulin Was Free.

Twitter introduced its "verified" badge in 2009. For the next thirteen years a small blue check beside a name meant that the company had satisfied itself the account belonged to the person or organisation it claimed to be. In the Boston Globe's summary, it went to "celebrities, public officials, journalists, and others who might benefit from being able to prove their authenticity online." It was not for sale. On 1 November 2022, shortly after completing his $44 billion purchase of the company, Elon Musk reviewed the arrangement in public: "Twitter's current lords & peasants system for who has or doesn't have a blue checkmark is bullshit." He then announced its replacement. "Power to the people! Blue for $8/month."

The new check came with a subscription to Twitter Blue, which launched on iPhone in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom on 9 November. It looked identical to the old one. As The Washington Post reported, Twitter was "not checking the identity of anyone who pays $8 for the check mark." Musk's position was that impersonators would be deterred by the knowledge that their $8 would not be refunded if their accounts were suspended. The Associated Press described the eligibility criteria: "anyone can get one as long as they have a phone, a credit card and $8 a month."

Nine Words

On the afternoon of Thursday 10 November, an account using the name and logo of the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly and Co, and carrying a freshly purchased blue check, posted the following: "We are excited to announce insulin is free now." According to the Post, which spoke to two people familiar with the matter, the real Eli Lilly panicked. Company officials scrambled to contact Twitter representatives and demanded the post be taken down. Twitter, its staff recently cut in half, did not react for hours.

In the late afternoon Lilly used its own account, @LillyPad, to address its 130,000 followers: "We apologize to those who have been served a misleading message from a fake Lilly account. Our official Twitter account is @LillyPad." Five hours later the fake was still up, and a Twitter ad-sales representative in New York was publicly pleading with Musk to remove it. It was suspended late that night, more than six hours after posting, by which time it had been viewed millions of times and had inspired copycats. One of these, also verified, offered a revised pricing policy: "Humalog is now $400. We can do this whenever we want and there's nothing you can do about it."

Lilly was not alone. Over the same few days, verified impostors posted as Nintendo, as Tesla and SpaceX, as former presidents Donald Trump and George W. Bush, and as LeBron James requesting a trade. A fake Lockheed Martin announced it was halting some weapons sales. Musk responded to a sexually explicit post from a fake President Joe Biden with two cry-laughing emoji, and observed that users had shared "some epically funny tweets." The following morning he reported that the launch was "overall proceeding well."

The Official Label

Twitter had anticipated part of the problem. On 9 November, the day of the launch, it began adding a second, grey check marked "Official" beneath the blue one on selected government, media and corporate accounts. TechCrunch could find no clear pattern in who received it: two US senators did, as did TechCrunch, but The Wall Street Journal initially did not, and neither did Musk. Later that day, in a reply to the YouTuber MKBHD, Musk wrote: "I just killed it." He added that Twitter "will do lots of dumb things in coming months." Esther Crawford, the product executive running the launch, said that "The official label is still going out." The grey checks began disappearing anyway.

According to the AP, the labels came back for some accounts on the Thursday night, after the insulin announcement, and then "many vanished again." By Friday morning Twitter was attaching "official" labels to Eli Lilly and other large companies, and had paused sales of the blue check, citing "impersonation issues." That evening Musk said Twitter would begin adding a "parody" tag to fake blue-check accounts. The previous day he had also turned his attention to the original badges: "too many corrupt legacy Blue 'verification' checkmarks exist, so no choice but to remove legacy Blue in coming months."

The Invoice

Eli Lilly's share price fell 4 percent on the Friday. The Post noted the fall was "in line with a drop in other health care stocks"; Fortune wrote that "How much the drop was related to the post isn't entirely clear." Twitter's users were less cautious. "The most consequential $8 in modern human history," read one widely shared post. Senator Bernie Sanders used the fake to draw attention to the price of insulin. Musk came to the company's defence, telling Sanders that the "price question is complex."

Lilly declined to discuss what it had spent on Twitter, but the cost to Twitter was more legible. By Friday morning the company's executives had ordered a halt to all Twitter ad campaigns and paused publishing from its corporate accounts worldwide. According to the marketing data firm MediaRadar, Lilly spends more than $100 million a year on television and digital advertising in the United States. "For $8, they're potentially losing out on millions of dollars in ad revenue," Amy O'Connor, a former senior communications official at the company, told the Post.

The Purge

The legacy checks were removed on Thursday 20 April 2023. Thousands of notable accounts lost them at once. Pope Francis, Oprah Winfrey and Jack Dorsey, Twitter's own co-founder, had not paid, and were no longer verified. Stephen King had not paid either. In 2022 he had greeted a proposed $20 fee with "[Expletive] that, they should pay me," and later explained: "It ain't the money, it's the principle of the thing." After the purge his check was still there, with a note explaining why. King posted: "My Twitter account says I've subscribed to Twitter Blue. I haven't. My Twitter account says I've given a phone number. I haven't."

Musk said he was personally paying for several high-profile accounts, including King's, whether or not they had asked. The others included LeBron James, who had written in March, "Welp guess my blue (checkmark) will be gone soon cause if you know me I ain't paying," and William Shatner, who had posted, the day before the purge, "Thank you, I accept." Musk replied to King: "You're welcome namaste."

Within days, blue checks also returned to the accounts of Kobe Bryant, Michael Jackson, Anthony Bourdain, Chadwick Boseman and Shinzo Abe, among others, all of whom had died. Each carried the explanation that the account was verified because it was "subscribed to Twitter Blue and verified their phone number." Legal experts told the AP that giving people subscriptions they had not wanted, and implying that they had paid, "could violate the federal Lanham Act, which prohibits false advertising."

Brussels

On 12 July 2024 the European Commission sent X, as Twitter had by then become, its first ever preliminary findings under the Digital Services Act. The first of three concerned the checkmark. X, it said, designs and operates its interface for verified accounts "in a way that does not correspond to industry practice and deceives users," adding: "There is evidence of motivated malicious actors abusing the 'verified account' to deceive users." Thierry Breton, the commissioner for the internal market, put it more briefly: "Back in the day, BlueChecks used to mean trustworthy sources of information. Now with X, our preliminary view is that they deceive users and infringe the DSA."

On 5 December 2025 the Commission fined X €120 million, the first non-compliance decision under the act. Reuters reported, via Al Jazeera, that €45 million of it was for the checkmark. The decision found that "anyone can pay to obtain the 'verified' status without the company meaningfully verifying who is behind the account," and noted: "While the DSA does not mandate user verification, it clearly prohibits online platforms from falsely claiming that users have been verified, when no such verification took place." X was given 60 working days to say how it would stop. Secretary of State Marco Rubio called the fine "an attack on all American tech platforms and the American people by foreign governments." Musk replied to the Commission's announcement with a single word, which Al Jazeera rendered as "Bulls***."

Pope Francis, who did not pay, lost his check. Stephen King, who did not pay, kept his, and said on the day that the badge claimed something about him that was not true. The European Commission reached the same conclusion two and a half years later. King's version was free.

Filed from public reporting:

Twitter Spent Thirteen Years Using a Blue Check to Confirm Accounts Were Who They Said They Were. The Day After It Started Selling the Check for $8 a Month, a Verified Eli Lilly Announced That Insulin Was Free.

Nine Words

The Official Label

The Invoice

The Purge

Brussels

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