In 2009, Twitter introduced the blue tick feature to allow users to distinguish between genuine accounts of celebrities and organisations and fake ones impersonating them. Up until recently, the system worked well – and then, Elon Musk entered the picture.
The Tesla billionaire completed his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter a little over two weeks ago. Soon afterwards, he announced that anyone on Twitter could get verified with an identical blue tick by paying a monthly $8 subscription fee. What could go wrong?
Plenty, as it turns out.
For a few hours, Twitter had two categories of blue checks, and they looked identical. One included the accounts verified before Musk took helm. “This account is verified because its notable in government, news, entertainment, or another designated category,” read the note on these blue tick accounts. The other category noted that the account subscribed to Twitter Blue
But as of midday Friday, Twitter Blue was not available for subscription.
Twitter was forced to pull the plug on its short-lived verification feature – which granted the coveted blue tick to anyone paying $8 a month – after the platform was flooded with a wave of imposter accounts.
Fake verified accounts using the names of celebrities, brands, organisations and companies began appearing on the microblogging platform Thursday – just hours after the feature was launched.
In the 48 hours that the blue tick was available to anyone willing to pay $8, fake accounts managed to unleash chaos on Twitter. Twitter ran to suspend many of these accounts, but couldn’t contain the damage they caused.
American pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly was among the high-profile casualties of Twitter’s ill-thought-out verification fee. A verified Twitter account posing as Eli Lilly tweeted that insulin was free, causing the company’s stock to drop 4.37% on Friday. Eli Lilly lost $15 billion in market cap because of the confusion and had to later post an apology informing people that insulin is not, and never was, free.
An account called @TeslaReal spent a few hours mocking Elon Musk in a series of tweets before it was suspended.
Brands like Nestle and Coca Cola had to deal with the fallout of verified imposter accounts. Both saw tweets mocking their business practices posted from verified accounts.
An account parodying Coca Cola with the verified handle @ActualCocaCola sent out a tweet that read: “We are proud to announce that we are the number one plastic polluter in the world four years in a row, and with god as my witness, we vow to do a fifth.”
Meanwhile, a fake Pepsi account tweeted “Coke is better.”
Nintendo, Lockheed Martin and SpaceX were also impersonated, as were the accounts of several political figures.
More bizarrely, a Twitter handle for Jesus Christ got verified on Twitter.
The impostors can cause big problems, even if they’re taken down quickly.
“They have created overwhelming reputational risk for placing advertising investments on the platform,” said Lou Paskalis, longtime marketing and media executive and former Bank of America head of global media. Adding that with the fake verified brand accounts, a picture emerges of a platform in disarray that no media professional would risk their career by continuing to make advertising investments on, and no governance apparatus or senior executive would condone if they did.
(With inputs from AP)
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