Twitter Boss Elon Musk Reveals Punishment for Impersonating Verified Users

By Cade Onder

Elon Musk has revealed what will happen if you impersonate a verified Twitter user with the new checkmark system. Earlier this year, Elon Musk bought Twitter for over $40 billion. The deal caused a lot of scrutiny as a lot of people believed he's not good for the app and would create more harm than good. However, he still has plenty of supporters as well who think he can do a lot of good by reforming Twitter. He became the owner of the app at the end of October and has begun making significant changes. He has already laid off half of the company and begun rolling out an update that will soon allow all users to buy a blue checkmark for their profile. The checkmark previously signified that the account belonged to a person of interest (celebrity, journalist, or politician) and their tweets weren't from an imposter.

Now, due to the way people can change their display names, pictures, and other things on Twitter, this has created a lot of questions about what this new checkmark system will look like. What happens if an average joe decides to buy a checkmark, change their profile to someone like Joe Biden, and causes anarchy? Well, they just get banned and they're allowed to make another account and pay another $8 for the Twitter Blue subscription, which gives them a checkmark. Elon Musk says if scammers want to do this a million times, they totally can. Some users pointed out ways to make this less of an issue, like making changes to the app's font so people can't use similar looking letters like a lowercase L in the place of an uppercase I to make their names look similar to another person's username. Musk agreed with the idea, meaning that they could look into this.

As of right now, it remains to be seen how out of control the imposter situation will get. If everyone is aware that the checkmark is basically meaningless now and doesn't actually represent someone's identity, people may quickly learn to take a closer look at profiles and not get fooled. However, we simply won't know until later.

What do you think of Twitter's new checkmark system? Let me know in the comments or hit me up on Twitter @Cade_Onder.

Trending Now: