Twitter relaunching Verified, with manual authentication checks

Elon Musk's plan to just give a blue "Verified" check mark icon to any Twitter user willing to pay, went as badly wrong as everyone else could and did predict. Following a flood of fake accounts started for comedic purposes, or worse, the plan was abandoned.

Now Musk has announced that he plans to bring it back as part of a new and more complex system.

Questioned about the idea of using a "gold check for companies, grey check for government, blue for individuals," Musk did briefly elaborate.

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

"Individuals can have secondary tiny logo showing they belong to an org if verified as such by that org," continued Musk. "Longer explanation next week."

It's not clear, then, whether there are actually to be four "verified" check marks, if a verified individual is also verified to be working with a verified company. It's also not known whether all or some of the new verification checkmarks will have to be paid for.

Despite stating that "all verified accounts will be manually authenticated," Musk gave no indication of how that can would be done. Previously, Twitter may have had the staff to do it, but Musk has been laying off huge numbers of workers, prior to starting a new hiring effort on about November 22.