Twitter’s new grey verification mark is now live. Details here

In a tweet, Twitter’s support wrote, “Starting today, you’ll start seeing additional icons that provide context for accounts on Twitter. In addition to blue and gold checks, you’ll see grey checks for government and multilateral accounts and square affiliation badges for select businesses.”

This new development has already shown up on some profiles. However, it has still not been fully rolled out yet, with several profiles of politicians still visible with the older blue-coloured tick.

Earlier this year, CEO Elon Musk, took to the microblogging site to make the announcement for its new verification system.

“Sorry for the delay, we’re tentatively launching Verified on Friday next week.” he posted.

“Gold check for companies, grey check for government, blue for individuals (celebrity or not) and all verified accounts will be manually authenticated before check activates,” the SpaceX owner added.

He had earlier tweeted about the usage of different colours for different organisations and individuals but fleshed out the details just recently.

“All verified individual humans will have the same blue check, as the boundary of what constitutes ‘notable’ is otherwise too subjective,” he tweeted.

What does the grey verification checkmark indicate?

As per Twitter, the grey checkmark indicates that an account represents a government institution or official, or a multilateral organization. Specifically, eligible government institutions include: national and local crisis response, public safety, law enforcement, and regulatory agencies, embassies, and other major national level agencies. Eligible elected or appointed officials include: heads of state, foreign official spokespeople, top diplomatic leaders, cabinet members (national level). Eligible multilateral organizations include institutional accounts, top officials, and official spokespeople.

The microblogging platform’s ‘Twitter Blue’ subscriptions rolled out despite warnings from Twitter’s own trust and safety staff. Soon afterwards, numerous ‘verified’ accounts began to impersonate well-known personalities or brands, according to a report by The Verge.

The chaos began with a fake Nintendo account, which posted the image of the well-known game character Mario raising a middle finger at the Twitter bird.

Meanwhile, another fake Twitter account emerged for ‘Eli Lilly’, the pharmaceutical company. It had tweeted that insulin had become free. As per a report by The Verge, this repelled numerous advertisers from the platform. Subsequently, Musk pulled off the $7.99 service a few days after its release.

Musk had taken the matter into his own hands and tweeted that any account that tried to impersonate someone else would be disabled unless its user declared it as a parody account.

Coming to the current multi-coloured verification system, Musk called it ‘painful, but necessary’. 

(With inputs from ANI)