Today is the day when Elon Musk has announced he will begin removing blue checkmarks from legacy verified accounts on Twitter. Whether the fact that it’s also April Fools’ Day is somehow related to the timing of the announcement remains to be seen. Musk’s story about how and why he plans to do this has shifted several times since buying the company, but he seems to remain blissfully unaware of how unpopular the decision is among many users. And yet, here we are. But many of the legacy news organizations had a message for Mr. Musk this week. They have no plans to pay for their designations and he can stick his blue checks where the sun doesn’t shine. (CNN)

News organizations have a message for Elon Musk: We are not going to pay you for checkmarks on Twitter.

The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, BuzzFeed, POLITICO, and Vox all scoffed at the notion on Thursday that they would pay Twitter for the feature, which has been free since it was introduced years ago but will soon be phased out.

Twitter announced last week that it will begin “removing legacy verified checkmarks” starting April 1. Musk has aimed to charge organizations that want to retain a checkmark adjacent to their account name $1,000 a month, plus an additional $50 a month for each affiliated account.

It’s a rare day when you see me agreeing with the Washington Post, but they seem to have hit the nail on the head here. The paper put out a statement saying, “it’s evident that verified checkmarks no longer represent authority and expertise.” I wouldn’t have put it exactly that way, but it’s clear that a blue check will no longer mean that the user has been authenticated and you can trust that the account isn’t a hoax or clone.

It’s not really a question of the money for me, though the amount Musk will be charging for “organizational accounts” seems pretty outrageous. ($1,000 per month plus $50 for each associated account? Really?)

I never saw the point of the “bonus features” you get with a Twitter Blue account beyond an edit button, which doesn’t appear to work in Tweetdeck anyway. But I had previously been willing to sign up if it was for the right reasons. As long as Elon Musk was going to maintain Twitter as a true bastion for free speech and needed more revenue to keep the operation going, I would have been willing to kick in eight bucks per month, or perhaps even ten. In fact, I almost did it last month.

But that’s not what has happened. We’ve been fed stories about how the legacy accounts represent “bad actors” and the “war” between the checked and the unchecked was some sort of class struggle. This is nonsense. Elon Musk’s fan base has shifted significantly toward conservatives since he took over and most of us are fiscal conservatives and fans of capitalism. We get it. You need to be able to make a profit. And if that was his pitch, as I said above, I would kick in for the cause.

But the way this entire proposal is being fed to us is simply misleading at best. On top of that, the whole “free speech” thing has had a few holes shot in it lately. More accounts have been suspended. The only difference seems to be which person or group’s “enemy list” you happen to be on. Speech must be free for all or it’s not really free speech.

I sincerely hope that Musk thinks better of this decision and changes course. But from the sound of things on his own Twitter feed, it doesn’t look like that’s about to happen. And if my followers start abandoning me in herds just because my blue check goes away, so be it.