New Delhi: After faltering on the first April 1 deadline due to lack of backend technology to achieve it, Elon Musk on Thursday gave another deadline of April 20 to remove all legacy blue check marks.
According to reports, there were technical challenges in quickly removing so-called blue ticks on a large scale and the only way to do it at present was through a manual approach.
Musk said in a tweet that “the deadline to remove the Legacy Blue check is 4/20”.
Details had earlier surfaced that the Musk-run company does not have the backend technology to delete around 4.2 lakh old accounts with blue ticks in one go.
“Removing verification badges is a largely manual process driven by a system prone to breakage, which draws on a large internal database – similar to an Excel spreadsheet – in which verification data is stored, according to former employees. According to The Washington Post.
“In the past, there was no way to reliably remove badges on a large scale — prompting spam-handling staff, for example, to remove check marks one by one. All of this together with duct tape was conducted,” it added, quoting a former employee.
Musk had previously given an April 1 deadline to remove all legacy accounts with Blue Verification. The company has so far only removed the blue tick for The New York Times.
Twitter introduced its verification system in 2009 to protect celebrities from impersonation, but now Musk wants everyone to pay $8 a month for a Blue Badge.
The White House and The New York Times denied paying for Verified Blue with the subscription service.
LeBron James, the highest paid NBA player of all time and earning over $40 million per year, also refused to pay Twitter.