It’s finally happening. After months of preparations and heads-up, Twitter on Friday started the mass removal of its coveted blue ticks from the platform. The blue tick on Twitter earlier was used to signify a verified account.
So when Friday morning came, celebrities such as Shah Rukh Khan, Anand Mahindra, Virat Kohli, Deepika Padukone and more lost their blue ticks from their Twitter profile.

The platform’s owner, Elon Musk, who bought Twitter for $44 billion, pledged to remove what he described as lords and peasants system, and offered to instead sell the blue badge to anyone who was willing to pay $8 a month.
Many blue ticks were also replaced by verified badges in gold or grey colours. As Twitter pulls blue ticks from high-profile accounts, here’s a recap of what profile labels mean.

Twitter is using visual identity signals such as labels and checkmarks on profiles to add more context about the account and help users distinguish different types of accounts.
Twitter-applied profile labels:
Blue checkmark
The blue checkmark on Twitter means that an account has an active subscription to Twitter Blue and meets the social networking platform’s eligibility requirements. However, the accounts that buy the Twitter Blue subscription to acquire the blue tick will not undergo review to confirm that they meet the social networking site’s criteria process which was used previously.

Gold checkmark
If a Twitter profile displays a gold checkmark on the account and next to the username, then that’s an official business account.

Grey checkmark
Meanwhile, the grey checkmark indicates that the Twitter account represents a government/multilateral organisation or a government/multilateral official.Affiliated badges
When the affiliated badge shows up on a Twitter profile, that means the account is connected to an organisation on the microblogging platform. The Twitter accounts that show affiliated badge include the profile photo of a Verified Organisation and is applied to all the affiliates of that organisation.However, an affiliated account on Twitter can have gold, grey or blue check, depending on what type of account it is.