Fans of the late celebrity Naya Rivera are infuriated after Twitter supposedly removed the blue verification checkmark from the actor’s profile.
Naya Rivera, best known for her role as Santana Lopez in the musical-comedy series Glee, tragically died last year in a boating incident. Along with her friends and family, she left behind a long withstanding fan base that is still active to this day.
While Rivera has had an acting career since the nineties, Santana Lopez was one of her most influential roles. Glee was a major success and ran for six seasons on Fox television.
Santana is often praised for her diverse representation on mainstream television as the character was both Latina and a lesbian. To top it off, Rivera also brought a rich, soulful singing voice to the character.
Due to this, fans found themselves outraged after discovering that Rivera’s account was no longer verified on the screens of many users.
The verification status on Twitter is very important to some. According to Twitter, the verification badge, “lets people know that an account of public interest is authentic.”
Top trending tweet from Twitter user @voguesblaine (a reference to Glee) shared a screenshot of Rivera’s unverified profile with the caption, “@twitter verify naya again please #givenayaherverificationback.”
Not only did the tweet tag the official Twitter page but it also used the now-trending hashtag #GiveNayaHerVerificationBack which is demanding that Naya Rivera is posthumously reacquainted with her verified status.
Another user, @LovingNayaR, retweeted a 2012 tweet from Rivera where she expressed her excitement towards finally being verified on the platform. The user adds the comment, “my heart” along with an emoji of a heart breaking.
This has truly hurt the feelings of Rivera’s fan base and although the problem seems to be resolved, they have yet to receive a comment from the official Twitter account.
It appears strange that the beloved actor’s verified status would be stripped posthumously, as many other deceased public figures don’t find themselves dealing with this situation.
The Glee cast has suffered numerous tragedies including the death of Cory Monteith who played the naive and loveable lead Finn Hudson and Mark Salling, the late actor who portrayed bad boy Noah Puckerman and was later arrested for possession of child pornography.
Shockingly enough, although Twitter states that to be verified the accounts must be “active” in order to remain verified, Monteith and Salling’s deaths are much less recent than Rivera’s and neither of them has suffered through getting unverified on Twitter.
This is something that is pointed out by many of the users of the #GiveNayaHerVerfificationBack hashtag.
As of now, participants are still tweeting the hashtag and it hasn’t been confirmed whether or not the issue has been resolved across the entire Twitter platform. However, many are sharing that the actor’s verification checkmark is back.
All six seasons of Glee are available for streaming on Netflix.