Twitter Blue, Elon Musk’s grand plan to rewrite the rules of verification, has been touted by the social media company’s new owner as a great democratizing solution to the issues he had with the platform’s legacy-verified accounts. For just $8 a month, accounts that otherwise wouldn’t have the clout of a verified badge on Twitter can now attain one, and with it, the legitimacy of being a trusted, verified source on Twitter.

There’s just one problem: A worrying proportion of the folks paying $8 for Twitter Blue are either wilfully or inadvertently pushing disinformation.

A new study by the Center for Countering Digital Hate’s (CCDH) Quant Lab shows over a quarter of tweets about Ukraine, vaccines, and climate change posted by paying subscribers to Twitter Blue contain misinformation.

“Elon Musk cynically claimed Twitter Blue would help combat scam content, but we found it has in fact put rocket boosters on the spread of lies and disinformation,” says Imran Ahmed, chief executive of the CCDH.

The CCDH pulled together a dataset of nearly 60,000 tweets containing the words “Ukraine,” “vaccine,” and “climate” posted by Twitter Blue users. These were users who had paid $8 a month to buy their subscription, as opposed to ‘legacy verified’ users, many of whom still have their blue check mark but have refused to pay for verification going forward.

The 58,588 tweets posted by Twitter Blue users containing one or more of those three words—which are often hot-button issues for dis- and misinformation, were all posted after Musk launched Twitter Blue on November 9. (Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

Out of those tweets, the top 100 most interacted with tweets containing each of the three keywords were then analyzed. Those 300 tweets had more than 930,000 likes, retweets, and comments combined. The CCDH looked at the claims made in the tweets and fact-checked them against verified information reported on by the media or independent fact-checking organizations.

They found that more than one in four tweets contained information that was contrary to the truth. In all, 23% of tweets about Ukraine from Twitter Blue accounts that the CCDH analyzed contained mis- or disinformation; 30% of tweets about vaccines were false; and 28% of climate-related tweets were incorrect.

Vaccine-related tweets analyzed by the CCDH included those attacking Anthony Fauci, the chief medical advisor to the U.S. president, whom Musk has also attacked, tweeting on December 11 “My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci.” Misinformation spread around the climate also came from the verified account of “catturd2”, an account previously removed from Twitter after promoting baseless claims about election fraud. CCDH analysis suggests that Musk has regularly interacted with the previously banned account since he became owner of the company.

“The problem with Twitter Blue and the notion you can pay to play introduces a number of maldistributions of power into Twitter,” says Siva Vaidhyanathan, the Robertson Professor of Media Studies and director of the Center for Media and Citizenship at the University of Virginia. “The fact that people who can and will pay $8 a month tilts the power toward people who generally support and cheer for Elon Musk. Those people tend to be extremists; they tend to radicals; they tend to be steeped in conspiracy theories. And they tend to be from North America and Western Europe.”