Musk is creating fertile ground for confusion on the social networking site.
We don't know how many times Musk has changed his mind, but after pushing the feature live, fake accounts are seizing on the chaos.
Some paying subscribers can now get blue check marks for their account, which injects the timelines with official accounts. Musk's skeleton crew didn't make any changes to the visual language of the blue check, so right now it signals that you're either really who you say you are, or you're someone random who just coughed up $8.
It is not possible to distinguish the two categories of blue check accounts from each other. Clicking through to look at a user's follower count isn't necessarily a reliable way to tell or find clues in their other tweets Clicking on the check mark itself from a profile page appears to display different copies, but that is subject to change.
The account that announced that the basketball star was requesting a trade away from the Lakers was created by an account that looked like him. The same treatment was given to Aroldis Chapman and other athletes.
Following sports transactions and news could become a total mess with the new verification system
Already fake LeBron and Aroldis Chapman tweets going around pic.twitter.com/vQgMqws1W0
— Joon Lee (@joonlee) November 9, 2022
Musk has changed his mind a number of times on the idea of making people pay $8 a month in order to get rid of bots. Anyone can impersonate someone else for $8 a month now that the feature is live. Almost all of the new features beyond the blue check mark are coming soon.
All of those accounts have been suspended but only after they gained traction. If it doesn't have any interest in vetting at the time of payment, it's impossible for it to catch all of this stuff.
The potential for abuse here is huge for a reliable news source. With many races not yet called we can definitely expect to see confusion that is more consequential than a fake basketball trade.
One of the things that makes Twitter interesting for the average user is Musk's plan to undermine celebrity presence. The platform's value is going to fall off a cliff if it can't find prominent people like athletes, politicians and movie stars to follow.
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