Celebrities are now removing the apparently mandatory check marks on Twitter

The past few days on Twitter have been way dumber than usual — and yes, we know, the bar should be cleared low — where Elon Musk’s Decree 4/20 to remove the “old” checkmarks has finally gone into effect. (Those were the ones that were once handed out to users to make it clear that they were who they said they were, unlike the current system, which uses a blue check to flag paid subscribers to Twitter Blue to avoid relentlessness.) After the Great Purge, though, many celebrities began noticing that they somehow had a blue checkmark anyway, complete with a false statement that they had paid for Twitter Blue and “verified their phone number” to get the checkmark. I started with a few people –William Shatner, LeBron JamesAnd King Stephen– and has since spread to a number of big names and big fan accounts.

In his various disturbingly parsed tweets about these things — interspersed with videos of his rocket launches that usually omit the parts where the rockets explode later — Musk said he “pay for” Some blue celebrity accounts by himself. This is usually presented, with General Elon Musk “lurking on terrible thing forums but it wasn’t funny enough to spread an “approach to humor” online, as a sublime trolling of his critics. (Without questioning the underlying assumption that Musk basically admits his overly busy feature functionally serves as a sign of shame to an overwhelming number of people.) The end result was people like Patton. Oswalt Find ways to get rid of blue tickusually by briefly changing the display name or avatar to reflect the validation system.

Unsurprisingly, he is the most prominent such user today holes, which remains, in many ways, the strangely throbbing heart of Twitter. The massively popular internet comedian — who He recently interviewed out of character for the first timewho currently has 1.7 million followers on Twitter — a blue check appeared on and off several times on his account today, amid tweeting a series of harsh insults to Musk. Recently, I retweeted a post about Lantham Lawwhich covers misguided attempts to make someone appear to endorse a product—and if we learn about US copyright law from a false tweet isn’t the ultimate indicator of how stupid today is, we don’t know what is.

Wait, actually, we’re seeing “sign up for Twitter Blue and verify their phone number” language on the account of late actors and performers like Chadwick Boseman And Norm MacDonald, where it showed up today with bounced checks. The current speculation is that blue checks — and perhaps just Twitter Blue itself — are being given to anyone with more than a million followers on the service. But there is a special kind of rage that comes from seeing beloved dead celebrities being co-opted into the effort as Elon Musk continues to stress again and again that he is not owned and not owned.