Ever since Elon Musk took over Twitter, the platform has been on a steep decline. Now the new Twitter Blue program has launched, causing unimaginable havoc.
Folks, the flood gates have opened: Twitter Blue is here. This is Elon Musk's genius plan to charge $8 to get an "official" verified account on Twitter, without any actual identification or verification process, of course. You pay, you get a blue tick. Fantastic. There's no way this could go wrong, right? Ah, my sweet, naive, summer child: it immediately went wrong in all kinds of ways. And it's a complete mess.
The Brave New World of Twitter.com
After the new Twitter Blue process was launched, the thing happened that everyone warned about: some random jackasses made accounts impersonating brands, paid for a "verified" tag and spread some fake news, lies, memes and so on.
This led to one of the funniest exchanges in Twitter history, as someone posted the upsetting image of Mario showing us the bird while impersonating Nintendo of America .
It's like this now, I'm sure advertisers will stick around pic.twitter.com/OE8PZxA5zx
— David Milner (@DaveMilbo) November 9, 2022
I mean, that's of course goddamn hilarious. This wave of nonsense is also extremely dangerous and annoying, especially when someone would do the unthinkable and pretend to be Rockstar to spread around a fake GTA 6 reveal date. Oh, and someone impersonated Valve and lied about a new game of theirs. Fun!
So far, you can only differentiate an actually verified account with a paid one by clicking on the profile and clicking on the verified tab, which is too much hassle. So far, Mr. Elon hasn't commented on this awfulness, so no change is in sight just yet. Until things change, be careful about what you read on Twitter... please.