Twitter Blue Ticks Restored For Some Celebs, Even Dead Ones: Know Why

There's been a never-ending brouhaha about the Twitter Blue ticks ever since Elon Musk began talks with the company about acquiring it. After the takeover, Musk-led twitter had announced that the much-coveted tick would be available to anyone who wishes to pay for it. The verification tick mark, which symbolised a certain elitism, was eventually removed from all profiles globally, for those who weren't subscribing to Twitter Blue. However, the social media platform eventually restored some of these blue ticks for celebrities, and even some who were dead.

Twitter said "account is verified because they are subscribed to Twitter Blue and verified their phone number" but several celebrities took to Twitter to deny the same. So what exactly happened and why did some people get back their ticks, let's take a closer look.

Twitter Blue For Only Those Who Pay For It?

Musk had announced that those who weren't paying for the service would lose their ticks on April 20. After the removal of blue ticks, some celebrities had been vocal about not subscribing to the Twitter Blue service, like LeBron James, Stephen King and William Shatner. Musk had eventually tweeted that he's paying for some subscriptions of public figures personally.

However, on Sunday, several celebrities got back their blue ticks. These included comedian John Oliver, musician AR Rahman, actor Shah Rukh Khan and cricketer Virat Kohli among others.

Their profiles explained that they'd subscribed to Twitter Blue and verified their phone numbers, but a number of them went on to tweet that they hadn't.

Twitter Restores Blue Tick Even For Dead People

In an even stranger development, Twitter even restored blue ticks for some dead celebrities, like actor Sushant Singh Rajput and American singer Chester Bennington. Last activity on their profiles was seen many months ago, in 2019 and 2017 respectively. Others who got their ticks restored despite having inactive profiles were late basketball player Kobe Bryan and late singer-songwriter and dancer Michael Jackson.

What was observed eventually, was that the social media platform had restored the blue tick for everyone with over a million following. Several highlighted how this was such an ironical move, as Musk's original idea was the democratisation of the blue tick, and promotion of free speech and equality.