X/Twitter to make people show their blue ticks – after forcing them onto users

X, formerly known as Twitter, will now make people show their controversial blue checkmark.

It comes shortly after the site gave the ticks to accounts with a particularly high number of followers.

Before Elon Musk took over the site, in 2022, blue ticks were awarded to particularly notable accounts, and were intended to show that they legitimately belonged to the people or organisations they claimed to.

After he took over the site, however, he removed those blue ticks from those accounts and instead made them part of Twitter’s subscription service. That led to considerable ridicule of those users who had them on their accounts, and led Twitter to give users the option to keep paying the premium fee but then hide the checkmark.

More recently, Twitter – now known as X – started adding the checkmark to accounts that have a high number of followers who also pay for the premium tier.

Now, the site will take away the option to hide that checkmark. That means that users will have no way of turning off the tick, even if they want to.

““The hide your checkmark feature of X Premium is going away soon,” a notification shown to premium users reads. “Tap to manage your X premium features.”

Unlike many other recent changes, Mr Musk did not announce the new policy or give any indication of why it had come about. His recent posts about X have focused primarily on trying to bring advertisers back to the service, after many left in the wake of a row that saw Mr Musk telling Disney and other advertisers to “go f*** yourselves”.