In violation of Facebook's rules, a Facebook fan page for Elon Musk has been verified to be the official page of the Tesla Technoking.
It is not pretending to be Musk. The page openly declares that it is a Musk fan page in its About section.
Musk has a Tesla Roadster car 0001 from Tesla Motors (a company in which is an early investor). The Roadster is an electric sportscar that can travel 220 miles on battery power. This fanpage allows you to upload tweets, etc.
The page has only 10 posts, the oldest dating back to October 21st. One post is a Musk photo, one is a notification about the page updating its profile picture to include Musk. The other posts are reposts from recent tweets.
This page was not created as an Elon Musk fan page. The Page Transparency tab shows some history, who manages it, and whether ads are run. It says that the page was created July 28, 2019, to represent a Kizito Gavin (reversed name of soccer player Gavin Kizito).
Since then, the page has changed its name six more times. The most recent change was to Elon Musk twice on October 17th. According to the Page Transparency section, the Page Managers are located in Egypt. Musk lives in Texas.
Also maybe worth noting: the URL for the page cuts off the end of the word official https://www.facebook.com/ElonMuskoffici which doesnt seem very official.
It is not clear when the page was verified. Facebook's verification rules require that you provide official identification such as a driver's license, passport or national identification card.
Big social media platforms face challenges with verification. Twitter also has struggled with this problem. It stopped its verification program in 2017 but relaunched the program earlier this year. However, the relaunch was not without its problems. In July, the company admitted that it had mistakenly verified a few fake accounts.
Meta, the company that was formerly Facebook, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
