Twitter appears to have been exerting all of its efforts over the past few days to stop a wave of verified accounts impersonating brands and public figures. This includes halting the Twitter Blue signups that cause them to appear in the first place and bringing back the “Official” grey checkmarks that Elon Musk had previously announced but later canceled.
However, some well-known impersonators have continued to utilize the platform for hours or even days despite Musk’s orders to do so by not using the word “parody” in their usernames. The popularity of the tweets is growing, which puts Twitter’s brand in more peril in the eyes of advertisers.
Let’s examine a few of the accounts that are active as of this writing:
A tweet from @Roblox US says that the popular game for young adults now includes sex. It has been up since Thursday morning at roughly 9AM ET. If this receives 1000 retweets, we’ll put cocaine back in Coca-Cola, read a now-deleted post from a fake Coke account that is still live and confirmed today. They were retweeted.
Even with a ten-hour-old tweet and over 2,000 retweets declaring the governor’s plan for “eradicating the people of Columbus,” an account mocking Ohio Governor Mike Dewine has evaded a ban.
Twitter is clearly taking action against some of the accounts. An account pretending to be Senator Chuck Grassley was suspended while this story was being published, however it took practically the entire day and one of its tweets had tens of thousands of likes. Similar circumstances occurred with a fictitious Donald Trump account that had numerous tweets with tens of thousands of likes and one with more than 10,000 retweets but never identified itself as a parody.
Even still, the fact that these tweets persisted for such a long time, particularly those from phony brands, is negative for Twitter. The company currently relies on advertising as its primary source of income. pretending to be from the drugmaker Eli Lilly and announcing that insulin was free.
Later, the company’s official account apologized for deceiving customers with the false. It’s impossible to say for sure if the tweets were even largely to blame for the big fall in stock prices that occurred on Friday for Eli Lilly and Lockheed Martin, which had a separate situation.
Even Elon Musk’s businesses were not immune:
In this amazing collection of impersonators (the most of whom have now been removed, in accordance with Twitter’s guidelines), Musk is seen responding to someone on Thursday who was discussing bogus postings from Nintendo and President Joe Biden with two laughing emojis. He probably won’t be laughing much today, though, as one of the biggest advertising agencies in the world, Omnicom, which has Apple, PepsiCo, and McDonald’s among its clients, recently advised its clients to temporarily postpone their Twitter advertising.
Since then, Musk has stated that Twitter will be “adding a “Parody” subscript to explain,” although it’s not clear if accounts will have to identify their content as parodies or if Twitter will do so automatically.
