Twitter Blue Subscribers Might Soon Be Able To Hide Their Checkmarks

Twitter Blue subscribers who don’t want their checkmark to advertise to the world that they paid $8 for it, may soon be able to hide it from their profile.

Alessandro Paluzzi, a mobile developer and leaker, claims(Opens in a new window), claims to have noticed Twitter testing an option to hide the Blue checkmark on profiles. As his screengrab of the in-development feature shows, one of the options reads: “Show or hide your blue checkmark on your profile.”

Since it became possible to pay for a checkmark, profiles with it have become targeted by abuse by users who mock them(Opens in a new window) for being a Musk fanboy or parting with $8 a month.

Tweet(Opens in a new window)

As The Verge notes(Opens in a new window), antipathy to Twitter Blue is so widespread that there are tools(Opens in a new window) that allow people to block anyone who is a Blue subscriber. 

Twitter, which started replying to all press requests with a poop emoji last week, did not immediately respond to PCMag’s request for comment as to whether this would be rolled out.

All Twitter Blue subscribers must provide and verify their government ID to use the features, which include longer tweets of up to 4,000 characters, and two-factor SMS authentication—a feature it got rid of for standard users recently.

In another move, Twitter said it would begin removing legacy verified checkmarks on April 1st. Musk has not been shy in demonstrating his disdain for the checkmarks, calling them “corrupt(Opens in a new window)” in November. The move means that post-April 1 anyone with a blue checkmark will most definitely have paid for it. It’s therefore not too much of a surprise that Twitter would be developing a feature that allows subscribers to hide their checkmark.

Twitter Blue hasn’t had the easiest of launches. In November, after a flood of new users hijacked the feature to impersonate celebrities and public figures including CEO Elon Musk, new Blue subscriptions were temporarily halted. Blue has reportedly attracted just 180,000 US (Opens in a new window)and 290,000 worldwide subscribers in the two months after its November relaunch.