The End of Twitter As We Know It

For those of you watching from the cheap seats as Elon Musk burns Twitter to the ground using his personal wealth as the accelerant, here’s the latest:

Anyone can now buy a blue check, even brand new accounts with no followers. There’s no distinction from the “real” blue checks that used to indicate an authority figure has verified the account. So for $8, anyone can pretend to be anyone, or any brand, and there’s no way to tell.

I think you see where this is going.

Naturally the copycats sprung up like toadstools in a dog park. Brands and institutions making crazy announcements that would terrify any stockholder, politicians and celebrities tweeting things that would normally get them cancelled for life.

Elon immediately recognized his folly and moved swiftly to implement a foolproof remedy. He declared that anyone pretending to be someone else has to disclose that fact. The next day he doubled down on his faith in the honor system but attempted to strengthen his edict. Now anyone who isn’t who they say they are must have “parody” in their username. He has spoken.

(As an aside, he tweeted all this from his personal Twitter account that only has about 1.5 million followers. He did not think to make everyone on Twitter follow him automatically like Tom from Myspace — which is what *I* would have done if I were a megalomaniac with a $44 billion dollar vanity project — but I digress.)