From The Verge: After chief twit Elon Musk made good on his promise to remove Twitter accounts’ legacy verification blue ticks last week, numerous high-profile accounts now appear to be re-verified — including a number of dead celebrities.
It’s likely that the re-appearance of their blue ticks is part of a wider (but unannounced) scheme by Twitter to restore verification to users with over one million followers. But hover over the blue ticks of the accounts of dead celebs, and Twitter will tell you they’re verified “because they are subscribed to Twitter Blue and verified their phone number.”
Michael Jackson, Chadwick Boseman, Kobe Bryant, Barbara Walters, Anthony Bourdain, and Paul Walker are just a few of the many deceased stars to have regained their verification status. The platform is even claiming that prominent journalist and columnist Jamal Khashoggi is forking over $8 a month despite having been murdered in 2018.
This is the company’s boilerplate message, but in the context it seems insensitive to apply it to the accounts of dead users. In some cases it might be true that the organizations that manage dead users’ accounts have applied for verification (Bosewick’s account, for example, mostly retweets the Chadwick Boseman Foundation for the Arts). But many of the accounts being re-verified have been dormant for years.
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