Musk’s paid blue ticks backfire, as Twitter is flooded with (hilarious) fake accounts

Who would have known freedom of speech coupled with possibly the most basic way to get verified would result in a blunder of epic proportions? Everyone except Elon Musk it seems.  

The subscription to Twitter’s new Twitter Blue service, which launched on 9 November, has kicked off with some rather interesting developments. It now costs only $8 (R140) to get a checkmark next to your name, and some internet trolls have predictably exploited the system to launch a flurry of tweets that would ordinarily have been easily identifiable as pranks.

More Musk, more problems

A day after the launch, Musk woke up to a whole new batch of problems with several ‘verified’ accounts of reputable brands tweeting out some rather offensive statements.

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Twitter has seen a number of spoof accounts pop up almost overnight, sporting the name of big brands such as Nintendo, BP Global and Roblox along with the verified tick and some damaging tweets.

To make matters worse, these spoof accounts seem to be issuing apologies for the original offensive tweets, but still spicing it up with some rather hilarious but damaging outcomes.

According to Associate Professor AJ Bauer in the Department of Journalism and Creative Media at the University of Alabama, the new goal was not to get more people to laugh at terrible puns, it was to get Elon Musk sued by bigger multinational corporations until he files for bankruptcy.

Change in ‘verified’

But according to the Twitter Help Centre, the definition of verification and the accompanying blue checkmark is changing.

Until now, Twitter used the blue checkmark to indicate active, notable, and authentic accounts of public interest that Twitter had independently verified based on certain requirements. Now, getting verified is as easy as 1,2,3.

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As of Wednesday, the blue checkmark may mean two different things: either that an account was verified under the previous verification criteria (active, notable and authentic), or that the account has an active subscription to Twitter’s new Twitter Blue subscription service, which was made available on iOS in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, US and UK on 9 November 2022.

Twitter is no longer accepting new applications for verification under the previous criteria.