It is an ordinary day. Perhaps you want to be informed about the new video games and the proposals of the most famous companies. You open Twitter, until now a reliable channel of communication, in which verification with a check mark in a small blue cloud was enough to know that the author of a tweet was verified. Suddenly you see Nintendo of America and you find this. wow. You’re not so family friendly anymore, right Mario?
Of course, after a moment, you come to your senses and realize that it is a fake account. I mean, honestly, unless the company was sold to Rockstar Games, Mario would never finger paint anyone. In addition, the account identifier says nIntendoofus or “ninten-fool”, obviously giving away this imitator. Anyway, keep scrolling, and you find some strangely compelling news: Valve is announcing Ricochet: Neon Prime, a competitive platformer, this Thursday. The ad is convincing and its aesthetic is consistent with Valve’s; the account seems to be verified, the phrase Neon Prime was registered by Valve, and it makes sense that the company, which has important eSport titles in its catalog, finally dedicates its own platform to them. But no: the ad is a fraud, created specifically to mimic all the elements of Valve’s style. Welcome to Elon Musk’s new Twitter.
What’s going on? Well, unless you live under a rock, you’ll know that Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion. Furthermore, in an effort to monetize a social network that actually makes little money, Musk has put up for sale the famous blue check mark, in an effort, according to him, to give “power to the masses.” And the masses have responded, creating dozens of false accounts of athletes, politicians, companies and the media, even characters like Jesus Christ already have their account verified. The result has been an unprecedented wave of disinformation, from openly offensive fake tweets to those carefully crafted to give the appearance of credibility.
What’s going on? As Musk said, for now: “Twitter will do a lot of dumb things in the next few months, we’ll keep what works and change what doesn’t.” And boy is the blue popcorn system a problem. If it is put up for sale, anyone can impersonate another; it is true that the moderation has been increased, but come on, it will never be possible to crush all the copies. Identifiers or handles are only useful if you already know what it was, which is highly unlikely. Of course, they are useful for someone who wants to investigate the truth, but it is not enough. The system has been so unsuccessful that an attempt was made to add a second label, “official”, which did not last a day on the site.
Anyway, what we want to say is that we are entering an era of misinformation and anarchy on Twitter. While Musk comes up with an idea for a fix, we ask our users not to believe anything they see on Twitter that isn’t independently verified, because there is currently no immediate way to distinguish between misinformation and reality. And he remembers: if Mario paints a bird, it’s not Nintendo’s fault, it’s another bird’s fault.