NEW YORK - JULY 23: A New York Times paper rack is seen July 23, 2008 in New York City. The New ... [+]
The New York Times was stripped of its check mark on Twitter after CEO Elon Musk called the newspaper “propaganda” on Saturday. Twitter recently announced that any account that didn’t subscribe to Twitter Blue for $8 per month would lose its check mark in April, but most non-paying users still have their check marks.
“The real tragedy of @NYTimes is that their propaganda isn’t even interesting,” Musk tweeted on Saturday.
“Also, their feed is the Twitter equivalent of diarrhea. It’s unreadable. They would have far more real followers if they only posted their top articles. Same applies to all publications,” Musk continued.
The New York Times told me on Thursday that it wouldn’t pay for any check marks on any of its accounts and wouldn’t reimburse individual reporters, “except in rare instances where this status would be essential for reporting purposes.”
While the New York Times has seen its check mark taken away from its main account, at least nine other accounts run by the newspaper are still verified, including New York Times Arts, New York Times Games, New York Times Music and New York Times Books.
The check mark verification program was introduced in 2009 after baseball legend Tony La Russa filed a lawsuit against Twitter over an impersonator. The program was a way for notable accounts to fight impersonation and to make sure users could trust the people and institutions they read on Twitter were actually who they said they were.
Under Musk’s management Twitter no longer verifies the identity of users who sign up for Twitter Blue, which leads many users to wonder what they’d be paying for. Musk has promised that many new features would become included with a subscription to Twitter Blue, but those have yet to materialize.
There have been conflicting reports about why Twitter hasn’t stripped all non-paying accounts of their check marks yet—a move widely expected by users on April 1. But anyone with a check mark right now should probably expect to lose it within the next two weeks. Unless, of course, Musk changes his mind again, as he’s know to do.
