X is giving blue checks to influential users (which is what blue checks were supposed to be all along)

X offers free blue checks to users who have more than 2,500 “verified” subscribers (or to people subscribed to So basically this means that if you are a popular poster, you will receive a blue check. This also means that these lucky ones are posting frantically to make it clear that they did not purchase a blue check – the blue check was imposed on them.

“Some personal news: I’m now a serial small business founder in Arizona who posts about fatherhood, faith, and what it takes to take a roofing company to $100 million ARR,” a new check blue, Tom Gara, job.

“It’s a punishment for posting too much,” another reluctant blue checker, Katie Notopoulos, wrote.

It used to be that Twitter’s blue checkmark indicated that a user was influential in some way. Now, this may seem foreign in the era of the paid blue check, but trust me: I was there, in the good old days of 2022, when X was Twitter, and Twitter had real advertisers, rather than a bunch of advertisements for AliExpress products shipped directly. Back then, blue checks actually helped us determine whether public figures are who they say they are. So if someone was popular on Twitter, perhaps because they are a celebrity, influencer or journalist, they would receive a blue check, which could also help reduce the spread of disinformation.

Until today, having a blue check meant one of the following things: you desperately want to feel important, you really want to use the premium features of month to Elon Musk, or you You are a crypto spam bot.

Today, we’re not quite back to square one, but Elon has actually reinvented the original purpose of the blue check. And yet, you still won’t be able to tell a “real” blue check from that guy responding who really wants you to buy his memecoin.