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Twitter has announced<\/a> that it\u2019ll start \u201cwinding down\u201d its legacy verified program and removing \u201clegacy verified checkmarks\u201d starting on April 1st, and is telling users to subscribe to its Blue subscription if they want to keep their blue check.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n There\u2019s a lot to unpack here. First, the announcement isn\u2019t necessarily a surprise. CEO Elon Musk has been promising<\/a> to get rid of \u201clegacy\u201d blue check marks, or verification badges that were given under Twitter\u2019s previous rules, since November, and he\u2019s reiterated<\/a> that they\u2019d be going away \u201cin coming months\u201d several times. According to Musk<\/a>, those verification badges were given out in a \u201ccorrupt and nonsensical\u201d manner (though they are in fact quite useful for letting users confirm that the celebrities they\u2019re interacting with are indeed the real person).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n However, it\u2019s also hard to ignore that April 1st is April Fools\u2019 Day, the worst holiday<\/a>, and that a large part of Elon Musk\u2019s personality is being a troll<\/a>. It\u2019s extremely <\/em>possible that this announcement, which came from the Twitter Verified account and not Musk\u2019s account, is just an attempt to freak out people with legacy check marks. It\u2019s a meme at this point that members of the press are overrepresented in the pool of legacy verified users, and these days Musk is clearly not<\/a> a<\/a> fan<\/a> of<\/a> the media<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n It\u2019s also possible that Twitter actually does intend to do this, and the date was just chosen as a troll, the way Musk likes to work 69 and 420 into almost<\/a> everything<\/a> he<\/a> does<\/a>. Also, it just added a huge banner advertising the change at the top of one verified Verge <\/em>reporter\u2019s timeline, so maybe it\u2019s really going to happen.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Even if it\u2019s serious about the date, Musk\u2019s Twitter has made a lot of promises about the future of the service that haven\u2019t been kept. For example, Musk announced a revenue sharing program in February, and his tweets are still the only thing we\u2019ve heard about it<\/a>. (Multiple Twitter Blue subscribers have told The Verge<\/em> they also haven\u2019t heard anything about the program.) Musk also promised to open source \u201call code used to recommend tweets\u201d on March 31st<\/a>, after missing his first self-imposed deadline to do so<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n He did, however, keep his promise<\/a> to make Twitter\u2019s press email respond to inquires with a poop emoji, which it did when we sent a request for comment for this story.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n This new timeline for the end of legacy checkmarks arrives as Twitter says it has now rolled out Twitter Blue subscriptions globally<\/a>, even though several promised features are still missing. If you\u2019re a brand or a government entity of some kind that requires non-Blue verification, Twitter has an application process for gray checkmarks<\/a> for government bodies \/ officials and gold checkmarks for businesses (which, down the line, might come at a steep price<\/a>). <\/p>\n<\/div>\n