[_djo_]

Your post said Blue ticks had nothing to do with being "verified" or "authentic." and It was a mark of social cachet, not authenticity..

That is clearly false. The blue check was an accurate signal of authenticity through verification by Twitter. What it was not was a universal verification mechanism that scaled to being able to verify everyone who used the platform. Those are two different things, and the lack of universality does not mean that the programme was not useful in valuable in providing a means to prove authenticity and avoid impersonation of the many people it did cover.

Moreover, the company was actively working on ways to scale it up into being able to reliably verify many more people before Musk bought it.

Now all that is gone, and a blue check means nothing to other users of the platform other than as a sign that the holder is paying for premium features. It's no longer a trustworthy verification mechanism.

[Amezarak]

And yet somehow, impersonation is no more a problem on X than it was on Twitter.

The fact is nobody paid attention to the blue check except the people who had one. The outcry was because a set of people felt elite because of their blue checks and were upset that anyone could get one. Hilary Clinton or Donald Trump or Kanye West impersonators are not an issue on the platform.

[_djo_]

There have already been high profile impersonations, one of which caused a company’s stock to dive. Another was the infamous situation where Musk freaked out over people impersonating him.

The only reason it’s not worse is because of inertia and the fact that most public figures are still using the accounts they had when verification was in place. That won’t last. It’s also why public figures who are leaving for other platforms usually opt to keep their X accounts in place but dormant.

Kanye was in fact impersonated on Twitter in the past, it was one of the key reasons behind the introduction of Verified Accounts.[0]

I have also seen impersonators for all three of those you mentioned, especially in terms of crypto bots for Trump. However those are also three of the most heavily policed and watched profiles by the company’s understaffed moderating team, who proactively monitor for impersonations. That’s not true for lesser public figures: I just searched for a hand full of well-known journalists and found several impersonation profiles for them all.

What’s worse, their impersonation reporting function does not let you report the impersonation of someone who is not an active user. I know another public figure who doesn’t have an account there, doesn’t want one, but now hasn’t been able to get them to do anything about an impersonator who is using his name to scam others.

The current model is badly broken and decidedly worse than the verification system that existed before.

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2009/06/06/facing-lawsuits-and-compla...