Over the past few days, Twitter has seemingly been doing everything in its power to stop a wave of verified accounts pretending to be brands and public figures.
Some high-profile impersonaters have stayed on the platform for hours or even days, despite Musk's rules, because they didn't have "parody" in their usernames. The popularity of the tweets is increasing the danger for the brand of the company.
There are some accounts that are still up.
Sex will be added to the game popular with young adults. It was up since around 9 AM on Thursday. An account pretending to be Coke had a now- deleted post that said they would put cocaine back in Coca-Cola if 1000 people followed them. Those were the retweets.
An account parodying Ohio Governor Mike Dewine has managed to escape a ban despite its ten-hour old post with over 2,000 retweets announcing the governor's plan for "eradicating the people of Columbus."
The accounts that are being cracked down on are not the ones that are popular. It took almost a full day for the account to be suspended, though it did get tens of thousands of likes. It was similar to the situation with a fake Donald Trump account, which had multiple tweets with tens of thousands of likes and one with over 10,000 retweets, but didn't mark itself as a parody.
It is a shame that these fake brands stayed up for so long. Advertising is the main source of revenue at the moment. Advertisers don't like a platform that lets people impersonate them. There have been several very brand-unsafe social media posts, one of which was a person pretending to be Eli Lilly and saying that they were free of diabetes.
People were fooled by the faker and the company apologized. The stock prices of both Eli Lilly and Lockheed Martin plummeted on Friday, though it is not possible to say for certain if the drops were caused by the tweet.
Even Musk's companies haven't been unscathed.
On Thursday, Musk responded to someone talking about fake posts from Nintendo and President Joe Biden with two laughing emojis, as shown in this amazing collection of fakes. I don't think he's laughing much today, as one of the world's biggest ad firms advised its clients to hold off on advertising with the social networking site for a while.
It is not clear if accounts will have to mark themselves as parodies, or if they will be made to.
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