The past 48 hours on Twitter have been a disastrous landmine of impersonators, trolls, and others forking over cash for a blue checkmark, causing confusion for users, and making it impossible to quicky distinguish what accounts are actually real or not.
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Although Elon Musk‘s acquisition of Twitter has been nothing short of dramatic — legal battles, the overhauling of internal operations, mass layoffs, the dissolution of the Board — one of the latest changes, the rollout of Musk’s $7.99-pay-for-verification plan, is causing chaos because it doesn’t have any actual verifying.
The new system is garnering disdain from Musk’s contemporaries, including Mark Cuban. The billionaire took to Twitter late Wednesday to air his grievances about how the new blue checkmark system was making it difficult for him to see what accounts were actually notable versus what accounts had just purchased the checkmark.
It’s working for me. That said, we can definitely make the verified mentions tab more usable.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 10, 2022
As a part of the plan, when an account with a blue checkmark responds to or interacts with a user’s tweet, it will surface first and at the top of replies and mentions.
However, Musk’s response was not sufficient for Cuban, who then began a multi-tweet rant about the inherent flaws with Musk’s new checkmark system, how it’s ruining the user experience, and how it overall takes away from Twitter’s greatest strength — the speed at which users can find and share verified and valuable information.
Of course, Cuban had to get the last word by ending his rant with words directed solely at Musk by saying “Again. Your business Your call.”
Musk had temporarily introduced a grey checkmark feature earlier this week which would give a secondary, not-available-for-purchase identification to certain verified accounts but swiftly removed the feature just hours after its rollout, saying that he would move ahead with only using the blue checkmark as the “great equalizer.” So far, it’s not going well.
Twitter is being inundated in verified impersonation accounts. It’s not just individuals but brands as well. Given the volume, moderation is falling behind allowing tweets that can damage brands to go viral. Brands will likely put immense pressure on Twitter to stop this.
— Alejandra Caraballo (@Esqueer_) November 9, 2022
Following sports transactions and news could become a total mess with the new verification system
Already fake LeBron and Aroldis Chapman tweets going around pic.twitter.com/vQgMqws1W0
— Joon Lee (@joonlee) November 9, 2022
Sports is the main reason so many people are still on Twitter, and having fake Schefter, Woj, Passan etc etc reports floating around might push a lot of folks to just wait for the official news push notifications pic.twitter.com/tIxpMfVlNH
— Joon Lee (@joonlee) November 9, 2022
I see the “verification” system is going juuuuuuuuuuuust great. pic.twitter.com/Ck8N5WTReb
— Mike Masnick (@mmasnick) November 9, 2022
fake verified nintendo providing the twitter content we’ve been waiting for pic.twitter.com/N8byXyEd6e
— ian bremmer (@ianbremmer) November 10, 2022
Musk did not Tweet directly about the complaints but polled his followers asking if they had seen fewer spam and bot accounts since his acquisition.
Are you seeing far fewer bots/scams/spam?
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 10, 2022
As of 12 p.m. EST on Thursday, over 2,043,000 users had voted with the vote nearly split 50/50, with 51% of voters saying yes and 49% saying no.
This is not the first time Cuban has taken to the social media platform to diss the Tesla founder.
Back in April, Cuban claimed that Musk’s bid to purchase Twitter was his snide way of “f—king with the SEC” following a $40 million lawsuit that Musk and Tesla had to pay out to the organization after Musk tweeted infamously that he had “funding secured” to take Tesla private.
Earlier this month, Cuban tweeted that he was looking forward to Musk’s “era” as leader of the platform, backhandedly saying that he will “flex” to “show everyone who’s in charge.”
I’m looking forward to the @elonmusk era on Twitter. He is a ready,fire,aim entrepreneur who will truly enjoy fucking with everyone who has an expectation of him. The only expectation you can have of @elonmusk is that he will flex his independence to show everyone who’s in charge
— Mark Cuban (@mcuban) October 28, 2022