He’s had enough of people pretending to be him
Elon Musk has had enough of being ridiculed, and we don’t just mean by Mike Myers’ Saturday Night Live impression.
After purchasing Twitter in October 2022, the tech billionaire has reshaped the social media platform in his own vision, famously stripping back community guidelines, changing verification, and removing the block button.
While Elon Musk has been accused of decimating Twitter in terms of its general spirit and its financials, it’s not his perfect platform just yet.
In his latest sweeping changes, the tech billionaire is clamping down on parody accounts and those impersonating people they aren’t. Good luck to the @GrimReaper account.
From April 10, these accounts must be branded with ‘fake’ or ‘parody’ at the start of their usernames.
Twitter previously allowed parody accounts if they were labeled for comedy, but since Musk took over and rebranded as X, it has struggled to stop the legitimate ones from those often used by scammers. After all, we’ve seen how easy it is scam people out of thousands while pretending to be Brad Pitt.
Musk has had enough of his impersonators (NBC)
Musk was criticized for the verified badge, which as well as legitimising journalists, could be used to determine celebrities from people pretending to be them. Since adding X’s Premium subscription package, anyone can put a blue checkmark next to their name.
Although X did introduce a ban on accounts impersonating others, Musk’s commitment to freedom of speech allowed a loophole for parody accounts – as long as they were labeled as parody.
You were supposed to mark yourself as a parody simply by putting a message at the end of your name, but due to character limits, many were cut off.
There have been many parody accounts of Musk himself, often trying to scam users with cryptocurrency schemes. One gained hundreds of thousands of impressions by asking users to like and comment to win a Tesla.
X has now deemed that parody accounts will have to put specific keywords in front of their name AND can’t use the same profile picture as the account they’re impersonating: “These changes are designed to help users better understand the unaffiliated nature of PCF accounts and reduce the risk of confusion or impersonation We encourage all affected accounts to update their profiles before the enforcement date.”
Still, there are fears this won’t be enough to save those who aren’t as tech savvy as they could be from the many Musk impersonators.
When the news was shared on X, there was an immediate backlash, with one person writing: “You created this mess, just give a separate check mark for official accounts.”
Another complained: “Why did it take so long to address this obvious problem?”
A third said: “Every single one of these accounts are engagement bait grifters, you should shadow ban their accounts to irrelevancy.”
Looking at the many other issues with X, someone concluded: “You need to stop letting blocked people read posts. Some of them are dangerous.”
Namely, the comments were full of examples of how people have been personally tricked, or know of people who have been tricked, by these so-called parody accounts. While this should be the beginning of the end for these grifters, something tells us it’s not.Featured Image Credit: Matt Cardy / Contributor / Getty
