The White House Won’t Pay For Staff’s Twitter Checkmarks

The White House has told its staff that it won’t pay for their Twitter profiles to continue to be verified ahead of the company removing legacy verified checkmarks, Axios reports(Opens in a new window). 

In a Friday email sent to staffers by White House director of digital strategy, Rob Flaherty said: “It is our understanding that Twitter Blue does not provide person-level verification as a service. Thus, a blue check mark will now simply serve as a verification that the account is a paid user.” 

President Biden and Vice President Harris will stay verified with gray checkmarks, as will top government officials, but it’s not clear which officials will hold on to the checkmarks, according to a source who spoke to Axios. In his email, Flaherty said Twitter can no longer guarantee verification for federal government accounts that don’t meet its new eligibility requirements. 

The source tells Axios this guidance is only for individual staffers at the White House, and doesn’t represent overall government agency plans. If White House staffers want a blue checkmark, they’ll have to pay for Twitter Blue on their own, Flaherty writes.

As Axios notes, companies and businesses are required to pay $1,000 per month for the benefits of a gold checkmark, and the blue checkmarks of their employees, though Variety reports that Twitter will exempt the top 10,000(Opens in a new window) companies and organizations from that fee.

In March, Twitter CEO Elon Musk announced that legacy verified checkmarks would be removed starting April 1. As of Saturday morning, however, they were still in place.

Twitter launched its gold and gray checkmarks on Dec. 2 amid a relaunch of Twitter Blue. On Dec. 20, Twitter launched Blue for Business, which allows companies to link any number of their employees to their accounts. Employees get a small badge featuring their company’s profile picture, shown next to their checkmark.