Verified followers on X (Twitter): what they are and why they count

Your verified followers are the people following you whose accounts have a checkmark. X's app has a "Verified Followers" tab that lists the "Verified accounts following" a profile, your own or someone else's. If there are none on yours, it says "You don't have any verified followers yet". No X help page describes the tab. It was first reported on 29 August 2023.

Verified doesn't mean X checked who they are. X's page on the blue checkmark says: "The blue checkmark indicates an active X Premium subscription, not account verification." It adds: "It does not mean that the account has been ID verified." X's separate ID verification is optional, open only to individuals, and shows as its own label.

The old meaning is gone. Until 2023, Twitter gave the checkmark to accounts it judged "active, notable, and authentic". X says those accounts "did not retain a blue checkmark unless they are subscribed to X Premium", and it began winding the program down on 1 April 2023.

X has three colors, and its Premium page says what each means:

Paying isn't enough on its own. X says the checkmark appears "after a review to ensure subscribed accounts meet all eligibility criteria": a display name and profile photo, a confirmed phone number, activity in the past 30 days, no recent change to the photo, name or @handle, and no signs of being misleading or deceptive or of platform manipulation and spam. X's criteria include no follower count and no minimum account age, though X says it may "impose waiting periods for new accounts in the future at our discretion, and without notice."

X doesn't say which colors count as verified followers, in the tab or in the count. Its API lists "blue, government, business" as the verified types of an account.

In the EEA, X no longer calls blue-check users "verified" but "Premium". X says the change comes from "the European Commission's Decision of 5 December 2025, which concluded that X's blue checkmark misled users and breached the European Digital Services Act", and that it is appealing. The Commission fined X €120 million that day, for the checkmark and two other breaches, saying that "anyone can pay to obtain the 'verified' status without the company meaningfully verifying who is behind the account".

The list is the "Verified Followers" tab in X's app. It shows no count. The count is in two places:

• X's analytics, which have shown it since December 2024. On 7 December 2024, @XCreators posted: "Verified follower count is now available in account analytics!" X put its analytics page behind Premium in June 2024. What else it shows: your follower history on X.
• X's API, whose user data has a verified_followers_count field, "The number of verified followers of this User." An app that reads it can show you the number.

Before the analytics count, Thurrott wrote in April 2024 that "there's currently no easy way to check your number of 'verified' followers on X".

Verified followers are what X counts when it decides who can earn money on it. As of October 2026, X's help pages say:

X words the 2,000 rule two ways. The Creator Subscriptions page says "verified followers", and the Subscriptions policy says "2,000 or more active followers with Premium subscriptions". Original Content Rewards pays on "unique impressions from Premium users", and that includes Premium Basic, which has no checkmark.

There was also free Premium. On 28 March 2024, Elon Musk posted that accounts "with over 2500 verified subscriber followers will get Premium features for free and accounts with over 5000 will get Premium+ for free". The free checkmarks showed up on 3 and 4 April 2024, on accounts that hadn't asked for them, the AP reported. We found no report that the Premium+ tier was given out, and no X page that says the rule still runs.

The numbers have moved several times, and some press reports got them wrong. Going by X's own pages and posts:

The 2,000 of December 2024 was for subscriptions. The @XCreators thread that announced it was about "subscription applications", and X's revenue-sharing page stayed at 500, though two outlets we read reported it as a revenue-sharing change. The earlier rules come from the revenue-sharing help page as archived on 13 July 2023, 28 July 2023, 11 August 2023, 9 October 2024 and 27 December 2024, and from X's post of 9 October 2024.

X doesn't publish it. The closest figure comes from SpaceX, X's parent company since it took over xAI in February 2026. In a filing with the US SEC on 20 May 2026, it counted "approximately 4.4 million X Premium and Premium+ paid subscribers" as of 31 March 2026. The filing doesn't say whether that includes Basic, which has no checkmark, and doesn't mention Premium Business or Premium Organizations.

A checkmark isn't a sign of reliability either. NewsGuard looked at the 250 most-engaged posts that pushed one of 10 false or unsubstantiated claims about the Israel–Hamas war between 7 and 14 October 2023. It found that "186 out of these 250 posts — 74 percent — were posted by accounts verified by X". That's one topic in one week, not a rate for all of X.

X's rules forbid it. Its Authenticity policy bans "coordinating with and/or compensating others to conduct account metric inflation in any X features, including Likes, Polls, Replies, Reposts, Lists, Views, or Follows", and "using or promoting third-party services to perform any of the transactions described in this policy".

For the creator programs, X also reviews who applies. Original Content Rewards says meeting its requirements "does not guarantee admission", and X's ID verification policy says X "also requires ID verification for all creators receiving funds through Ad Revenue Sharing and Creator Subscriptions programs." How to spot bought or fake followers, and what X removes on its own: fake followers on X.

We don't show which of your followers have a checkmark, and our export has no column for it. What we track is the whole list: who follows you, who left, and how your follower count changes over time.

At every check, which is once a month on Free and every day on the paid Kong plan, we compare your follower list with the last one and DM you on X about each account that left, checkmark or not. One DM names up to six, and the dashboard has the rest. A verified follower who leaves counts the same as any other. If your count drops and you want to know why: why your follower count went down.