Elon Musk says Twitter will begin manually authenticating Blue, Grey, and Gold accounts as soon as next week

Elon’s answer to Twitter verification hell is to go back to manually authenticating accounts. Oh, and making the tick a different color. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Elon Musk says that Twitter’s check mark program could return on Friday, December 2nd, with a new procedure to verify individual identities in order to resolve impersonation issues. Musk described the new manual authentication process as “painful, but necessary.” Verified check marks will also be expanded with additional colors — gold for companies, grey for the government, and the original blue for individual accounts.

As it turns out, offering so-called verified check marks for an $8 monthly subscription without actually verifying identities wasn’t a brilliant idea. After Musk ignored warnings from Twitter’s own trust and safety staff, the platform’s paid Twitter Blue subscriptions rolled out and quickly resulted in some ‘verified’ accounts impersonating notable public figures and brands, driving away advertisers from the “high-risk” platform. Musk has since said that the company wouldn’t relaunch Twitter Blue until “we’re confident about significant impersonations not happening.”

Musk had previously said that Twitter “will probably use different color check for organizations than individuals,” though this is the first time he’s offered details. “All verified individual humans will have [the] same blue check, as boundary of what constitutes ‘notable’ is otherwise too subjective,” Musk said in a tweet. “Individuals can have [a] secondary tiny logo showing they belong to an org if verified as such by that org.”

The Twitter CEO says he’ll offer a longer explanation about how everything will work at some point next week.