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March 28, 2024

In the 24 hours after Twitter last week removed the blue check mark historically used as a means of identifying public agencies, at least 11 new accounts began impersonating the Los Angeles Police Department.

More than 20 purportedly various agencies of the federal government. Someone impersonating the mayor of New York City promised to create a Department of Traffic and Parking Enforcement and cut police funding by 70%.

Mr. Musk’s decision to stop ticking verified individuals and groups and instead offer ticks to anyone who pays is the latest turmoil for Twitter, which has vowed to reshape the social media giant since he took office last year. acquired it for $44 billion.

The changes have shaken up a platform that once seemed indispensable for tracking global news. Information on Twitter is now increasingly unreliable. Accounts impersonating public officials, government agencies and celebrities have proliferated. Propaganda and disinformation also risk further undermining trust in public institutions. The consequences are only just beginning to be felt.

Twitter under Musk is systematically dismantling safeguards put in place after years of deliberation and controversy, said Alyssa Kahn, a research associate at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Lab.

“When so many things go wrong at the same time, it’s like: Which fire do you put out first?” she said.

After a public spat with NPR over Twitter’s false labeling of state-affiliated media as state-affiliated, the platform last week removed all labels identifying state media outlets, including those controlled by authoritarian states such as Russia, China and Iran.

This coincided with the decision to stop blocking recommendations on them, with many of these accounts seeing a spike in engagement, according to research by Digital Forensics Research Lab and Reset, another organization that studies disinformation.

In Sudan, new accounts on Twitter misrepresented both sides of the civil war that is raging there. One account, presumably, bought a blue checkmark that falsely announced the death of Lieutenant General Mohammad Hamdan, leader of the rebel Rapid Support Forces. More than 1.7 million people viewed the tweet.

Ella Irwin, Twitter’s new director of trust and safety, did not respond to a request for comment on the changes and their ramifications.

Twitter has been a constant source of misinformation and worse, but previous policies sought to inform readers where content came from and limit the worst cases. The verified accounts first appeared on Twitter in 2009 and are generally associated with Tony LaRussa, a Major League Baseball manager who sued Twitter for trademark infringement and other claims after he was impersonated on the platform.

Verified accounts with a blue checkmark direct users to official sources and real people over time. Labeling news organizations as national media shows that the reports reflect a certain point of view.

Copycats became a problem almost immediately after Musk took the helm in November and offered to sell checkmarks to anyone who subscribed to a monthly fee. He backed off after companies like Eli Lilly and PepsiCo grappled with seemingly verified fake accounts promising free insulin and extolling the superiority of Coca-Cola.

By last week, Twitter had begun removing blue checkmarks from companies, government agencies, news organizations and others who disagreed with the payment. It seems that many people choose not to sign up, although Twitter did not disclose any data.

Some cheered the changes.

“Now you can even find me in search,” tweeted Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of Russian state broadcaster RT, which has been accused of spreading misinformation and hate speech against Ukraine . “Brother, Elon @elonmusk, from the heart,” she tweeted.

Twitter’s algorithm previously excluded accounts flagged as state officials or the media from recommendations, stifling engagement. According to Reset, 124 accounts belonging to Russian state media saw an average 33 percent increase in views and impressions following the changes that took effect in late March.

They included accounts such as Dmitri A. Medvedev, the former Russian president and vice-chairman of the National Security Council, who on Tuesday posted a photo that misrepresented President Biden and called him in English a ” Bold old man”.

When an account argued this month that Twitter was amplifying Russian genocidal propaganda against Ukraine, Mr Musk replied Contemptuously: “All news is propaganda to some extent. Let people decide for themselves.” (The account he replied to has since been suspended.)

A sudden change in how the check marks are acquired would be confusing, to say the least, the researchers said. They can also undermine trust in communication tools during crises such as natural disasters.

The main LAPD account has a gray checkmark that Twitter created for “legacy accounts,” but not all of the various departments — such as the Hollywood department. In addition to offering a blue check mark for $8 per month, Twitter is inviting organizations to pay $1,000 to get a gold mark for multiple accounts. At least for a while, one expanded into a Disney Junior imposter account that tweeted racist and vulgar language.

“It will be chaos for emergency services,” Marc-André Argentino, a researcher at the London-based International Center for the Study of Radicalization, wrote on Twitter.

Mr. Argentino has tracked examples of an account posing as Chicago’s mayor replying to an account posing as the city’s Department of Transportation. The other is an account actually run by the government in New York City is at loggerheads with an imposter.

“Yes, it was hilarious and made us all laugh,” Mr Argentina wrote. “Taking a second now, going back to any mass casualty event in a major city, or a natural disaster, or any crisis/major event, when people turn to official sources of information when they need and think about the harm this could cause. “

Kelly Carlin, daughter of comedian George Carlin, Tweet to complain Someone pretended to be her running an account for her late father, even using the same profile picture and claiming to be her.

“This is where it all started,” she wrote, complaining after multiple unsuccessful attempts to delete the imposter account, “twitter is brokenThe parody account was still running on Wednesday, with nine followers.

Josh Boerman, co-host of the pop culture podcast “The Worst of All Possible Worlds,” is the source of an account impersonating New York Mayor Eric Adams, who promises to create a traffic and parking department and cut police funding.

Mr Borman said he had worked hard to leave clear hints that he was a copycat.his tweet thread Including the unrealistic scene where all the police guns are melted down and sold for scrap, with the proceeds going to the parks department. He founded an organization with a ridiculous name: The Pig Humane Society of New York City. He promotes his podcast on Twitter, which has a relatively small 1,700 subscribers.

“Almost everyone immediately understood that it was a joke and that was my hope – I wasn’t trying to mislead anyone,” Mr Borman said. “The point is, this can both be a joke about the current state of the web, and it’s an opportunity for us to think about how the media communicates and how we perceive our public figures.”

The removal of the blue verification badge created “immediate and pure confusion,” but the novelty eventually wore off, he said. His profile name is now “bosh (no longer mayor)”. He said he would be careful to use other sources to confirm any announcements he saw on Twitter.

“The problem comes when your account may have hundreds of thousands of followers and you’re positioning yourself as the real thing,” Mr Borman said. “Twitter’s approach of ‘well, if people pay for verification, they must be legal’ is so stupid, I don’t even know how to put it into words.”





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