Fake accounts get blue ticks after roll-out of pay-to-get-verified scheme
letters@hindustantimes.com NEW DELHI/ SAN FRANCISCO:
Twitter was dealing on Thursday with the first pitfalls of its new policy after accounts with verified badges began impersonating famous figures, including world leaders and sports stars, tweeting out controversial content.
The chaos erupted after the roll-out of the social media giant’s new plan, where users paying $8 per month for the platform’s subscription service, Twitter Blue, would receive the network’s famous blue checkmark that signals a verified account.
In one of the more high-profile cases, an account impersonating the former American George W Bush tweeted, “I miss killing Iraqis,” and was retweeted by another fake account pretending to be former British prime minister Tony Blair with the comment, “Same”.
As the day wore on, more fake accounts appeared, including of US President Joe Biden, and gaming company Nintendo that tweeted an offensive picture.
In the sports world, an impersonator led people to believe Basketball star LeBron James wanted to leave the Los Angeles Lakers. A number of other tweets seen on Wednesday involving US sports teams and personnel normally would have been major news, but instead, came from fake accounts, which already were a long-standing and occasionally disruptive issue for Twitter.
The accounts were shut down hours later. Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk on Sunday defended his much-criticised launch of a paid subscription service to verify user accounts.
“Widespread verification will democratize journalism & empower the voice of the people,” he tweeted, responding to concerns from associations, advertisers, and even the United Nations, who fear a surge of hate speech and misinformation on the network. The change represents the end of Twitter’s previous verification system, which was launched in 2009 to prevent impersonations of high-profile accounts such as celebrities and politicians. Before the overhaul, Twitter had about 423,000 verified accounts, many of them rank-and-file journalists from around the globe that the company verified regardless of how many followers they had.
Experts have raised grave concerns about upending the system that its 238 million daily users determine whether the accounts they were getting information from were authentic.
The change comes a day after the company began laying off workers to cut costs and as more companies are pausing advertising on Twitter as a cautious corporate world waits to see how it will operate under Musk.