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Lo and behold, Elon Musk’s plan to give a blue checkmark to anyone who paid $8 to subscribe to Twitter Blue wound up how everyone thought it would: absolute chaos.
Accounts belonging to fake Presidents (current and former), multimedia accounts like Nintendo, and businesses like Tesla itself have sprung up in recent days and have unleashed havoc on the social media platform. For example, pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly has been in communication with Twitter as a result of a viral, verified tweet that indicated they were making the diabetes drug insulin free of charge for everyone.
Spokesperson for pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly says they're in communication with Twitter to address the fake-but-verified Eli Lilly tweet that has been up for three hours and has 1,500 retweets and 10,000 likes https://t.co/Ai3lq50YRh pic.twitter.com/zIWDsd8c0B
— Drew Harwell (@drewharwell) November 10, 2022
Fake George W Bush and fake Tony Blair have made friends, I see 👀 pic.twitter.com/Dt5w9Q3SRJ
— MiMi A (@meemalee) November 10, 2022
this verification thing seems to be going great. unironically. pic.twitter.com/HcUnKWhC3n
— shoe (@shoe0nhead) November 10, 2022
Twitter has been forced to pause the launch of Twitter Blue as a result of widespread impersonations
As a result, on Friday morning — mere days after launching the blue-check-for-all system — “Twitter has suspended the launch of Twitter Blue and is actively trying to stop people from subscribing ‘to help address impersonation issues,’ per an internal note.”
NEW: Twitter has suspended the launch of Twitter Blue and is actively trying to stop people from subscribing "to help address impersonation issues," per an internal note. 1/
— Zoë Schiffer (@ZoeSchiffer) November 11, 2022
According to the report from Platformer editor Zoe Schiffer, Twitter Blue has been disabled from being purchased on Apple iOS and the grey “official” tag — which was launched and shut down just hours later on Wednesday — has been reinstalled for advertisers only.
The announcement was posted on Slack: "An update on what we did tonight: hid the entry point to Twitter Blue, added the 'official' label for ONLY advertisers. Note: here is at least one way for users to sign up for Blue. Legacy Blue users can go to subscriptions and upgrade" 2/
— Zoë Schiffer (@ZoeSchiffer) November 11, 2022
The rise of impersonations and their repercussions were clear to virtually everyone except Musk, as the average Twitter user simply does not have enough media literacy — or perhaps they just don’t care — to accurately and consistently discern fact from fiction. What’s going to happen when a fake Disney account springs up and racks up one million likes for tweeting something racist?
Given that Musk has only been the CEO of Twitter for a couple of weeks, this is really just the tip of the iceberg of the potential chaos he’s unleashing on the social media service, which is hemorrhaging top executives and could file for bankruptcy in the coming months, according to Elon himself.
RELATED: Fellow Billionaire Mark Cuban Blasts Elon Musk For Turning Twitter Into A ‘Nightmare’