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Comment by memish | Hacker News Reader

The verification system didn't prevent that anyway. In fact, there's a verified blue check account right now under Elon's latest tweet impersonating Elon:

https://twitter.com/RodArdehali/status/1589022536913797120

It's long been common to see these.

Now that it'll cost $8, the account would be suspended and Twitter keeps the $8.

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I’ve noticed that since the 8 dollar checkmarks rolled out today a bunch of people have paid for it and then used it to impersonate Elon. That person you linked might not have been verified beforehand and just bought it today.

I tried to look for their past tweets on the internet archive but didn’t find anything. So I can’t say for sure if they were verified beforehand or not.

I looked into it more and it seems I might be wrong about the rollout. It looks like iOS rolled out the new subscription, but I didn't see if they actually added checkmarks yet. I saw a new story saying checkmarks wouldn't be rolled out until after the election. So, the original commenter might have been right that there were musk impersonators before paid checkmarks became a thing.

I can say fore sure that there were verified fake Elon Musks before the rollout.

For example

https://twitter.com/iamsimonyoung?s=21&t=bk20O5m6wZsdz0lQ9AT...

was posting as Elon Musk at least until 20221102. There was at least one other Elon Musk that was regularly spilled into my timeline, sometimes right before or after the real Elon. These accounts had also the same profile picture. It took me a while to realize that some of these posts are satire. Pretty much the scenario the blue checkmark was supposed to prevent.

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