In the 24 hours after Twitter last week removed the blue tick that historically served as a means of identifying public agencies, at least 11 new accounts began impersonating the Los Angeles Police Department.
More than 20 would be different agencies of the federal government. Someone posing as New York City mayor promised to create a Department of Traffic and Parking Enforcement and cut police funding by 70 percent.
Mr Musk’s decision to stop giving check marks to people and groups verified to be who they said they were, and instead offer them to anyone who paid for them, is the latest uproar on Twitter , the social media giant he’s vowed to recreate since buying it for $44 billion last year.
The changes have shaken a platform that once seemed indispensable for following news as it erupted around the world. The information on Twitter is now becoming increasingly unreliable. The number of accounts impersonating government officials, government agencies, and celebrities has skyrocketed. This also applies to propaganda and disinformation that threaten to further erode trust in public institutions. The consequences are only beginning to become visible.
Alyssa Kahn, a research associate at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, said that under Mr. Musk, Twitter systematically dismantled the protections put in place after years of consideration and controversy.
“When so many things go wrong at the same time, it’s like: which fire will you put out first?” she said.
After a public dispute with NPR, which falsely labeled Twitter as state-affiliated media, the platform last week removed all labels identifying state media, including those controlled by authoritarian states such as Russia, China and Iran.
That, coupled with a decision to stop blocking recommendations for them, coincided with a spike in engagement for many of these accounts, according to research from the Digital Forensic Research Lab and another organization that studies disinformation, Reset, established in London.
In Sudan, new accounts on Twitter falsely represent both sides of the civil war that has broken out there. One account that supposedly bought a blue tick falsely proclaimed the death of Lieutenant General Mohamed Hamdan, the leader of the rebel Rapid Support Forces. More than 1.7 million people viewed the tweet.
Ella Irwin, Twitter’s new head of trust and security, did not respond to a request for comment on the changes and their implications.
Twitter has always been a source of misinformation and worse, but the previous policy was designed to inform readers about the sources of content and limit the most egregious instances. The debut of verified accounts on Twitter in 2009 is usually associated with Tony La Russa, a major league baseball executive who sued Twitter for trademark infringement and other claims after being impersonated on the platform.
Over time, verified accounts with blue ticks led users to official sources and real people. Labeling news organizations as state media indicated that the reports reflected a particular point of view.
Impersonators became an issue almost immediately after Musk took over in November and offered to sell the checkmarks to anyone who signed up for the monthly fee. He came back after companies like Eli Lilly and PepsiCo struggled with apparently fake accounts that promised free insulin and praised Coca-Cola’s superiority.
Last week, Twitter began removing the blue checkmarks from companies, government agencies, news organizations and others who refused to pay. It seems that many chose not to sign up, although Twitter has not released numbers.
Some applauded the changes.
“Now you can even find me in the search,” tweeted Margarita Simonyan, the editor-in-chief of RT, the Russian state television network accused of rampant misinformation and hate speech directed at Ukraine. She captioned the tweet by saying, “Brotherly, Elon @elonmusk, from the heart.”
Twitter’s algorithms previously excluded accounts labeled state officials or media from recommendations, dampening engagement. According to Reset, 124 Russian state media accounts received an average 33 percent increase in views and impressions following the changes, which went into effect at the end of March.
They include accounts such as that of Dmitri A. Medvedev, Russia’s former president and deputy chairman of the country’s Security Council, who posted a distorted photo of President Biden on Tuesday, calling him “a bold dude” in English.
When an account argued this month that Twitter was amplifying Russia’s genocidal propaganda against Ukraine, Mr. Musk replied dismissive: “All the news is propaganda to some extent. Let people decide for themselves.” (The account he responded to has since been suspended.)
Researchers said the abrupt changes in how the ticks are obtained threatened to at least cause confusion. They can also undermine confidence in a means of communication during crises such as natural disasters.
The Los Angeles Police Department’s main account has a gray check mark, which Twitter created for “legacy accounts,” but not all of the various agencies do — the Hollywood Division, for example. In addition to providing blue ticks for $8 a month, Twitter has invited organizations to pay $1,000 to receive gold marks across multiple accounts. For a time, at least one was extended to a Disney Junior imposter account that tweeted racist and vulgar language.
“This is going to be chaos for emergency services,” tweeted Marc-André Argentino, a research fellow at the London-based International Center for the Study of Radicalization.
Mr. Argentino followed up on examples of an account in which the mayor of Chicago posed in response to an account posing as the city’s Department of Transportation. Another had the real New York City government-operated account arguing with an imposter.
“Yes, this is funny, let’s all laugh,” Mr. Argentino wrote. “Take two seconds now and go back to any mass casualty incident in a major city, or natural disaster, or crisis/critical incident when people turn to official sources of information in times of need and think of the damage it can cause. ”
On Friday, comedian George Carlin’s daughter, Kelly Carlin, tweeted an accusation that someone was posing as the account she manages for her late father, even using the same profile picture and claiming to be her.
“HERE IT STARTS,” she wrote, later complaining after several failed attempts to have the imposter account removed that “Twitter is broken.” The spoof account was still active on Wednesday, with nine followers.
Josh Boerman, who co-hosts a pop culture podcast, “The Worst of All Possible Worlds,” was the source of the account in which he impersonated New York City Mayor Eric Adams, vowing to create a traffic and parking department and reduce police fees.
Mr Boerman said he had done his best to leave clear hints that he was an impersonator. Are tweet thread included unrealistic scenarios where all police officers’ guns were melted down and sold for scrap, with the proceeds going to the parks department. He invented an organization with a ridiculous name: the New York City Porcine Benevolent Association. He promoted his podcast to his relatively small Twitter following of 1,700 users.
“Virtually everyone immediately understood it was a joke, and that was my hope – I wasn’t trying to mislead anyone,” said Boerman. “The point was that this could be both a joke about the state of the network right now and an opportunity to think about the way media is distributed and how we feel about our public figures.”
Removing the blue verification badges caused “immediate and sheer chaos,” but the novelty eventually wore off, he said. His profile name is now “bosh (no longer mayor)”. He said he made sure to confirm every announcement he saw on Twitter using other sources.
“The problem arises when you have accounts that have maybe hundreds of thousands of followers and position themselves as the real thing,” Boerman said. “Twitter’s approach of ‘Well, if people are paying for verification, they must be legit’ is so nonsensical I don’t even know how to put it into words.”
