Golden, grey, blue: What do the verified Twitter account colours mean?

Finally deployed is Twitter's improved account verification programme. Prior to this update, every account had a blue tick but now, some accounts have turned gold and soon more will turn grey.

Billionaire CEO Elon Musk, took to the microblogging platform to make the announcement last month: "Sorry for the delay, we're tentatively launching Verified on Friday next week." he posted.

"Gold check for companies, grey check for government, blue for individuals (celebrity or not) and all verified accounts will be manually authenticated before check activates," the Tesla owner added.

"Starting today, we’re replacing the “official” label with a gold checkmark on some business accounts on Twitter," an official statement from the site said.

"Soon, we’ll also add a grey checkmark for government and multilateral accounts," the statement read.

Musk has previously tweeted about the use of various colours for various organisations and people, but only recently did he go into more detail.

"All verified individual humans will have same blue check, as boundary of what constitutes "notable" is otherwise too subjective," he tweeted.

Blue checkmark

The blue checkmark can indicate one of two things: either that a user's account has been verified according to Twitter's previous verification standards (active, notable, and authentic), or that the user has an active subscription to Twitter Blue, the company's new subscription.

The active, notable, and legitimate criteria that were applied in the prior process will not be reviewed for accounts that obtain the blue checkmark as part of a Twitter Blue subscription. 

Gold checkmark

"The gold checkmark indicates that the account is an official business account through Twitter Blue for Business," Twitter announced.

Government accounts (institutional accounts, elected or appointed officials, and multilateral organisations), some political organisations like political parties, commercial companies including business partners, major brands, media outlets and publishers, and some other public figures are given the designation of official profile.

Labels on state-affiliated profiles give users more information about the accounts that are under the authority of specific state-affiliated media organisations and people closely connected to those organisations.

Government labels are applied to accounts from the key nations where Twitter is active that are highly involved in geopolitics and diplomacy.

"These labels also contain information about the country the account is affiliated with and whether it is operated by a government representative or a state-affiliated media entity. Additionally, a small icon of a flag is included, to signal the account’s status as a government account or of a podium for state-affiliated media," the social media site said.

Previous launch

The Verge reported that despite warnings from Twitter's own trust and safety personnel, the microblogging platform's "Twitter Blue" subscriptions went live.

Following that, several "verified" accounts started to imitate well-known figures or brands.

A phoney Twitter account for the pharmaceutical corporation "Eli Lilly" has also surfaced. It said that insulin was now free.

The Verge said that this drove many advertisers away from the platform. Musk then quickly abandoned the 7.99 USD service once it had been introduced.

Any account that attempted to mimic someone else would be disabled, according to a tweet from Musk, unless the account's owner acknowledged it to be a parody account.

Regarding the existing approach of multi-coloured verification, Musk described it as "painful, but necessary."

He said that a 'longer explanation' of how the system would work would come out 'next week'.