Elon Musk’s Twitter Blue with verification is now live

The new Twitter Blue, which now costs $7.99 per month and gets you a blue verified check mark, is officially available in its app for iPhones and iPads. Twitter owner Elon Musk began hyping the new Blue just days after taking over the company at the end of October, promising features like verification, priority in replies, mentions, and search, and “half as many ads,” and now you can actually get the new subscription.

Right now, for people who subscribe to the new package, their account instantly adds a verified check, but the other new benefits aren’t available yet. According to a support page, “only accounts subscribed to Twitter Blue on iOS on or after November 9, 2022 are eligible for the blue checkmark moving forward.” It’s unclear when the new subscription will become available for users on Android, Twitter web, or in countries where Twitter Blue wasn’t already available. And new Twitter accounts created on or after Wednesday aren’t eligible to sign up for Blue “at this time,” Twitter says.

On the signup form on iOS, the $7.99 per month price is positioned as a “limited time offer.” For the moment, you can’t sign up on the web — you have to sign up on iOS.

While Musk has positioned paid verification as a way to increase trust in the platform, the idea has also come under criticism for possibly enabling the exact opposite, in part because it could theoretically let anyone pay to say they’re the verified version of anyone else.

The revamped Blue is a big change from what it was before. Until now, the Blue’s most notable feature was perhaps the ability to edit tweets, which finally came to Twitter after years of desperate begging from users. The service also had a cheaper $4.99 per month price, but we should probably be grateful that the new Blue didn’t cost $20 (thank you, Stephen King), though given that “limited time offer” language, perhaps the price will get there eventually.