Elon Musk had promised to take away all of Twitter�s blue check marks doled out to Hollywood stars, professional athletes, business leaders, authors and journalists unless they start buying a monthly subscription to the social media service.

Musk�s goal was to shove the advertising-dependent platform he bought for $44 billion last year into a pay-to-play model � and maybe antagonize some enemies and fellow elites in the process.

But the Saturday deadline passed and the blue checks are still there, many with a new disclaimer explaining they might have been paid for or they might not have been paid for � nobody but Twitter really knows. The company didn�t return a request to clarify its changing policies Monday.

DOES A BLUE CHECK MATTER?

Matt Darling has been on Twitter for about 15 years and never cared about not having a blue check, though he�d get a kick out of whenever a verified account of �some real-world importance� started following him.

�People on Twitter will joke about blue checks like they�re the aristocracy but I don�t think anyone actually thought that,� except for Musk, Darling said.

Now, Darling finally got a blue check after paying $11 last month to try out some of the features that come with a Twitter Blue subscription. But seeing it becoming more of a �scarlet letter� under Musk than a symbol of credibility, he used a technique to scrub the blue tick from his profile.

�Now it�s a signal of you�re a person who�s not making good tweets so you have to pay for engagement,� said Darling, an economist at the center-right Niskanen Center.

Musk has said that starting April 15, only verified accounts will appear in Twitter�s For You feed that recommends what tweets people see. Darling is planning to drop the subscription � it had too many glitches, and he�s not looking for more online clout.

�I don�t want Twitter to be pay-for-play. I want it to be a place where people writing interesting tweets are getting the engagement,� he said.

HYBRID MODEL

Instead of taking away the blue check marks, Twitter on Sunday began appending a new message to profiles: �This account is verified because it�s subscribed to Twitter blue or is a legacy verified account.�

In other words, singer Dionne Warwick and other high-profile verified users still have their blue checks. But so does anyone who pays between $8 and $11 a month for a Twitter Blue subscription � and there�s no way to tell the difference. (Warwick, for her part, made clear she won�t be paying for a blue check because that money will �be going towards my extra hot lattes.�)

That hybrid solution was good enough for Star Trek actor William Shatner, who earlier balked at signing up for a subscription but on Sunday tweeted to Musk: �I can live with this. This is a good compromise�. But it�s not clear if it is a temporary or permanent measure.

THE EXCEPTION

Twitter did take away at least one verified check over the weekend: from the main account of the New York Times. The account, which has 55 million followers, had previously been marked with a gold-colored check for verified organizations.

But a user pointed out to Musk over the weekend that the newspaper had said publicly it wouldn�t be paying a monthly fee for check-mark status, so Musk said he would remove the mark and also disparaged the newspaper�s reporting.

(AP)