The second day “Twitter Blue,” Elon Musk’s scheme to monetize Twitter verification by allowing anyone who pays $8 to have a blue check, turned out to be even worse than the first, as the flood of verified fake celebrity accounts that defined day 1 was superseded by verified accounts impersonating major corporations and advertisers — including Musk-owned Tesla Motors.
And if that wasn’t bad enough, Twitter also saw some truly hilarious verified accounts pretending to be real politicians and pundits, and at least one Actual NaziWho received a blue cheque.
We’ll start with the fake Tesla account using the handle @TesIaRealThe account became active on Thursday at 1:00 PM Pacific. The account has been active all afternoon, posting a few dozen tweets mocking Musk for everything. He was made rich by government subsidiesHe was at the helm for Twitter for a so-far terrible time.
Here’s a sampling:
As of writing, the account remains active. Continues to tweet extremely brutal Musk roasts. We will see how much longer. Musk ignored the increase in fake and imposter accounts on Twitter last week, until people started to impersonate Musk. HeHe threw a fit, and banned all who did it, unless the account was closed. “clearly”This is a parody.
Musk will appear shortly before 6 p.m. Pacific. Finally, we got into the matterParody accounts will now need to have parody in the names and not just their bios, declares. Pro-Nazi accounts, such as the one above, would be exempted from this requirement. But, it is important to note that the fake Tesla accounts are still active and in good condition.
Another Twitter Blue fail occurred with an account pretending it was Eli Lilly, a pharmaceutical giant. Although clearly labelled a parody account in the bio, the account used this handle @EliLiIlyandCo and the company’s actual logo as its avatar and despite this managed to make it through whatever passes for validation on Twitter Blue.
The account immediately tweeted the announcement “We are excited to announce insulin is free now”Several thousand retweets later. The Eli Lilly Twitter accountA statement was issued apologizing for the incident. “misleading message”You can find the fake account here
The fake account remains active as of the time this article was written. Twitter discovered it in the afternoon and added a disclaimer to the account. “This is an impersonation account of an insulin manufacturer. Their real account is @LillyPad.”
British oil giant BP Global — you know, the company behind the Deepwater Horizon disaster — also had an imitator who managed to secure a blue check without any problem. A handle account @BPDeezNutzzSince April 2022, has been tweeting about environmental problems and how the oil industry makes climate change worse. It does this with a blue check.
And at least one Nazi actually managed to get his account verified by Twitter Blue (Image via Rachel Metz). We should also note that this was true despite the fact that it is literally included. “1488,”This is a well-known code Referring to two distinct white supremacist memesYou can find them in their handle.
But don’t worry, the impersonation of public figures also continued. For instance, these accounts pretending to be right wing commentator Ben Shapiro and President Joe Biden – again, both of these accounts received blue checks.
Other people gave Tony Blair, the former British Prime Minister, and George W. Bush, the former U.S. president, similar treatment.
This is all just the latest Twitter disaster for Musk, whose tenure as boss of Twitter has sparked an exodus of some of the company’s most crucial employees and a disastrous drop in advertising due almost entirely to advertiser concerns over content moderation.
We suspect the fact that Twitter is seeing both a rise in hate speech and in brand impersonators isn’t going to bring advertisers back any more than Musk’s clumsy attempt to bully them last week did.