Elon Musk’s mercurial leadership and half-baked product plans are already creating fertile ground for confusion on Twitter.
We’ve lost count of how many times Musk has changed his mind or offered contradictory claims about what a new paid $8 verification badge would do, but after pushing the feature live, fake accounts are seizing on the chaos.
Twitter’s bought blue check marks are now available for some paying subscribers, injecting the timeline with tweets that appear to be from official accounts. And apparently Musk’s Twitter skeleton crew made no meaningful changes to the visual language of the blue check, so right now it signals that you’re either really who you say you are — @CocaCola, for instance — or you’re somebody random who just coughed up $8 and got a stamp of approval.
Now when tweets appear in Twitter’s timeline it’s impossible to visually distinguish the two categories of blue check accounts from one another. Doing so would require clicking through to examine a user’s follower count, which isn’t necessarily a reliable way to tell, or searching for whatever clues might be found in their other tweets. Clicking on the check mark itself from a profile page apparently displays different copy too, but like everything on Twitter right now, that is subject to change.
So far this has resulted in some quick attention for an account impersonating LeBron James, which announced that the basketball star was requesting a trade away from the Lakers. A few other athletes...
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