Twitter logos outside the company's offices in San Francisco, Calif., on Dec. 19, 2022.Jeff Chiu/The Associated Press
Since Elon Musk’s takeover, Twitter has gone through many waves of significant changes. The company has faced firings and staff shortages, and the app itself has many new features that have been unveiled in the past year. While some have stuck, others have been modified or scrapped.
If you’re finding it hard to keep up with the way Twitter works now, you’re definitely not alone. Here’s are some highlights of the latest with Twitter, as of April 24:
Twitter Blue
Many of Twitter’s high-profile users have lost the blue checkmarks that helped verify their identity and distinguish them from imposters on the Elon Musk-owned social media platform.
After several false starts, the platform began removing the blue checks from accounts that don’t pay a monthly fee to Twitter Blue to keep them. Twitter had about 300,000 verified users under the original blue-check system – many of them journalists, athletes and public figures. The checks began disappearing from these users’ profiles late Thursday morning.
Checkmarks were returned to some high-profile accounts a few days after the purge, such as those belonging to New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman, chef Anthony Bourdain (who died in 2018), and actor Elijah Wood. Haberman and Wood (among others) claim not to have paid for Twitter Blue Subscriptions.
Labels and different-coloured checkmarks
Twitter introduced new labels earlier this month that prompted media organizations to leave the platform. The labels were removed from profiles a few days later.
The titles under accounts’ username were sorted into different categories, such as “government-funded” or “publicly-funded.” After the addition of “government-funded” to CBC and NPR’s Twitter accounts, among other news organizations, the two paused their activity on Twitter.
Twitter Verified Organizations, a paid subscription, enables organizations of all types – businesses, non-profits, and government institutions – to sign up and manage their verification and to affiliate and verify related accounts, bringing a flood of different-coloured checkmarks to the previous verification system.
Twitter used to offer free white-and-blue checkmarks to those who were “verified,” to prove the account’s authenticity. Now, according to its website, gold checkmarks mean an account is a business or a non-profit organization with a Verified Organizations subscription. A gray checkmark means the account is a governmental or multilateral organization.
Accounts with paid checkmarks are boosted by Twitter’s recommendation algorithm and are eligible to appear in people’s “For You” newsfeeds, according to Musk.
Twitter gave a free pass to the top 500 advertising spenders and top 10,000 most followed organizations on the platform, according to The New York Times.
New 10,000-character limits, edit buttons, new fonts
In March, the previous 280-character limit was increased to 10,000 characters for Twitter Blue subscribers. The company has previously tried to make Twitter a more long-form platform by bumping the limit from 280 to 4,000 back in February.
Under previous leadership, the platform was testing a Twitter Notes feature in 2021 that allowed writers to publish lengthy content directly on the platform, and also bought the Revue newsletter firm. The two projects were scrapped by Musk.
Metrics
Previously, users could only view the replies, retweets and quote tweets on Twitter. Since Musk’s takeover, Twitter has expanded its metrics to include additional information, such as the total number of views. Twitter metrics are data points that users track to determine their success on the platform.
New “For you” feed
The introduction of the new “For you” feed brought a stream of tweets from accounts users follow and those suggested to them based on an algorithm on users’ feeds. This feed is reverse chronological, meaning it shows the newest tweets first compared with the old default, which showed tweets from accounts users follow, with a bias for the ones dominating the conversation in their network that day. Users are still given the option of the previous “Following” feed, which only includes tweets and activity from accounts the user is following.
The rise and fall of “CoTweets”
CoTweet, introduced in Winter of 2022, was a way for two authors to co-write a tweet and was first unveiled as a “limited-time experiment” for select accounts in Canada, Korea, and the U.S.
The feature was discontinued on Feb. 1 and already existing CoTweets have now reverted to retweets.