Users discover verified accounts of dead celebrities on Twitter

Users have found several dozen accounts of deceased celebrities on Twitter with a blue check mark, that is, they have passed verification, which the service recently made paid. Writes about it Bloomberg. Among the dead celebrities who have verified Twitter accounts are singer Michael Jackson, actor Chadwick Boseman, journalist Jamal Khashoggi, chef Anthony Bourdain, and basketball player Kobe Bryant.

The fact that the accounts of deceased celebrities somehow passed the verification raises even more questions about the paid verification introduced by Twitter, which users have criticized before. The explanation for the blue checkmarks states that they were given because the user “subscribed to Twitter Blue and verified their phone number.” At the same time, it is not known who paid for the subscription in these cases, since the accounts have been inactive for several years. According to Bloomberg, Twitter, which no longer has a press service (Elon Musk, who bought the service last year, fired half of the company’s employees and made many changes to its work), could not “intelligibly” answer the questions of the publication.

A few days ago the American media wrotethat Twitter began removing verification checkboxes from those who did not subscribe to a paid subscription. Previously, it was mostly famous people who got these checkmarks to confirm that it was really their account, but now the main requirement is the payment of a subscription to Twitter Blue, which costs $8 per month.

Yana Rozhdestvenskaya