Elon Blesses Fake Accounts With Fake Verifications, Definitely Knows What He's Doing Here

Definitely not a trash fire!

How is New Twitter going? Just swimmingly! For those who haven't been keeping up, last week, Elon Musk got rid of all "legacy" checkmarks — i.e. those who had actually been verified under the old system, which required people to actually prove they were who they said they were. The assumption was that we would all freak out and feel so naked without our precious checkmarks that we would all scramble to sign up for Twitter Blue just to get them back. Many believed that a new system would come about wherein we all just pretended the new checkmarks meant the same thing as the old checkmarks, allowing the QAnon weirdos, Nazis, and the Musk faithful to be seen as "just as good and important" as celebrities, experts, and journalists.

 That ... did not happen. 

What did happen is that all of the celebrities who lost their checkmarks started coming out and saying they would never buy one, which really made things awkward because Elon's big promise to his acolytes was originally that they were finally going to get to be "just like" the celebrities they see on Twitter with blue checkmarks — like they had always deserved. But as it turned out, no one wanted to be associated with his fanboys, with Nazis, with conspiracy wackos, etc. etc. Many big accounts even publicly advocated blocking those accounts en masse, which — although he made this very easy to do by algorithmically boosting their posts — is exactly what he didn't want.

And so he had to force them. He forced free checkmarks upon some accounts that publicly advocated for blocking Twitter Blue subscribers, as well as every account with more than 1 million followers. He did this in hope of stopping the #BlockTheBlue campaign as well as to diminish the amount of stigma the checkmark now carries. He also did this without regard to whether or not they were actually verified under the old system, which has led to some amusing mishaps like verifying a parody account pretending to be God.

He even gave out a gold verification badge — signaling that one is part of a verified organization, which usually costs at least $1,000, to a fake "Disney Junior UK" profile with like, 1,400 followers and a tendency to use racial slurs.

 Variety   reports that in its pinned tweet, "the account — which, due to its content and follower numbers, does not appear to be an official Disney account — posted: “#FuckThatN****Elon, #KasherQuon and #MeowskullFeetFreaks.” (The original pinned tweet did not censor the racial slur.)."

Whoops! The account was deleted, but the incident still demonstrates the stupidity of this system.

The fact that actual verification no longer exists has also allowed people to open accounts with or without checkmarks claiming to be other people and organizations. For instance, on Friday, accounts pretending to be outgoing Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot and the Illinois and Chicago transportation departments announced that private cars and vehicles were now permanently banned from a section of Lakeshore Drive.

“Mayor Lori Lightfoot and Chicago & Illinois’ transportation departments just announced the permanent closure of DuSable Lake Shore Drive. Except, of course, they didn’t really do that. Fake accounts posing as (previously verified) government accounts did & 100k+ people saw.”

— Jake Sheridan (@Jake Sheridan) 1682094981 

The irony is that Musk is doing exactly what people wrongly insisted the old system was doing — arbitrarily assigning checkmarks to people thought to be "important" by those at Twitter. In reality, those of us who were verified had to submit a picture of ourselves with our photo ID, a link to our outside work (which we were at one point required to keep in our profile) and three articles not written by us citing us or our work in some capacity. In other words, you had to prove that you were who you said you were and that other people knew who you were and recognized you as such. Actual verification was a lot of work, which is why they stopped accepting applications for several years. By not actually verifying God or Fake Disney Junior, by making it so people can't actually be sure if tweets are coming from a real person or a troll account, Musk is steering the site towards a mountain of chaos that is eventually going to render it entirely unusable.

But hey! Some trolls got to feel super important for a few seconds, and that's really what matters.

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