Elon Musk tweeted Friday that legacy Twitter Blue would soon be sunset.

Susan Walsh/AP

• Elon Musk tweeted Friday that legacy Twitter Blue, which he calls Blue Verified, will soon be sunset.
• Since Musk took over Twitter, he has allowed paying subscribers to receive blue checks.
• Until now, the platform allowed people with “free” blue checks under Twitter’s old verification system to keep them.

In a few months it might be even harder to tell which Twitter accounts are authentic and which ones are not. 

On Friday, Elon Musk tweeted that the legacy version of Twitter’s verification system was “deeply corrupted” and would be sunset in a few months. 

—Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 3, 2023

Before Musk took over Twitter and revamped the platform’s verification system, Twitter doled out “blue checks” to the active accounts of notable athletes, politicians, and public figures to let other users know they were the real deal and prevent others from falling for fake accounts.

But one of Musk’s first orders of business after taking over Twitter was to revamp that system. 

He decided to envelop it into the platform’s already existing subscription tier, Twitter Blue. 

That meant that blue checks wouldn’t just go freely to notable figures to denote their authenticity, but to anyone who paid a monthly fee for Twitter Blue. 

The first version of Twitter Blue, which was rolled out on November 5, resulted in almost 140,000 paying for a subscription in its first five days. However, it also led to an onslaught of celebrity impersonators, including fake Elons, swarming the platform. 

By November 11, Twitter suspended the rollout of Twitter Blue, relaunching again in December, with gold checks for verified business accounts, gray checks for government and multilateral accounts, and blue checks for paying subscribers, or those who were verified in the pre-Musk era. 

Right now, when you hover over the latter checks you’ll see a box pop up that says, “This is a legacy verified account. It may or may not be notable.”

In a few months though, the only thing a blue check will signal is that someone is paying at least $8 a month to use the platform.

But some key questions remain: What will happen to notable figures who fail to pay for Twitter Blue? Will they be confused with imposters who paid for Twitter Blue but use famous names on their accounts?

Twitter did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for a comment.