'What happened?' X users complain about mysterious outbreak of 'free' blue-check badges

X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, appears to be handing out free blue check badges to certain accounts.

"Apparently they're giving me a blue check that only the wise can see?" said attorney and commentator Andrew Fleischman.

"Whyyyyy … is my check mark back?" said Associated Press reporter Seung Min Kim.

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"What’s going on?! How come I’m getting my blue check back? I haven’t paid anything for it," said feminist writer Mona Elthaway.

"Excuse me, why do I have a blue check mark?" wrote legal analyst Bradley Moss.

The feature, which originated in 2009 as a means to indicate a person's identity was verified, was turned into a paid status symbol after the website was bought in 2022 by tech billionaire Elon Musk, who has tried to shift the platform from an advertiser model to a subscription model.

This has largely not worked, as paid signups haven't been nearly what the company was expecting or what would be necessary to replace the tens of millions of dollars in annual revenue lost from advertisers who fled over concerns about brand safety.

So why are people who haven't paid for blue checks suddenly getting them — a phenomenon that already happened once before after the retooling of the feature? One theory, circulated by many affected people, is that Musk is trying to increase the cachet of the feature, which has been widely mocked and derided, by making it look like more people paid to use it.

"I see that Musk is going back to the failed attempt to stick blue checks on people to try to obscure the difference between sensible folks and people who will pay eight dollars to Elon Musk," said former Naval War College professor Tom Nichols.

"What happened? I didn’t pay for this. I would NEVER pay for this," wrote actress Yvette Nicole Brown. "When did the Blue Check mark start getting passed around again?!"