Twitter claims that dead celebrities have subscribed to Twitter Blue | Hacker News Reader

Twitter claims that dead celebrities have subscribed to Twitter Blue

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61 pointsjsheard30 comments

This is of course illegal since it's claiming dead people are paying for a product in order to advertise it. I filed an FTC complaint just cause it was easy.

nb the old Blue was useful and I did pay for it, the new one is basically features for scammers and people who want to get into fights.

How do you know this is done with intent to promote or advertise for 'it'?

Could be an agent or loved one took the time to preserve the memory or are we just claiming there is some type of ill play here.

It's a bit weird that all these people signed up on the same Saturday night.

Activition and subscription are two different tasks though. There may have been some delay in decision making making whether or not to allow dead people to be verified and also the payment method.

Their agents like Rhianna Pratchett said they didn't do it. And of course there's living people getting it who don't want it.

We have hundreds of thousands of people, including many dead people (or their supposed teams) suddenly deciding, within hours of each other, to sign up. We have had enough people explicitly say they'll never sign up ahead of time, and after their check showed up, they said they didn't sign up. And we had Elon Musk himself admit he's "subscribing" people objecting to the program.

I mean... how much more evidence do you want?

It's mass, MASS false endorsement. And that's highly ILLEGAL.

It’s consistent with Elon’s behavior to date.

Pelé, Chadwick Boseman, Norm Macdonald, and probably others have also posthumously subscribed to Twitter Blue and verified their phone number.

Just watching all this flailing is exhausting. Imagine working for that restless adderall monkey.

It looks like Twitter HQ just decided to give the blue check to every account over 1 million followers. But since they only have the one type of check mark + explanatory message, they just applied that.

It looks like pretty weak automation; changing the visible name on the account apparently breaks it and removes the check.

The name is tied to the verification. When you change your name a human at Twitter needs to confirm the change is legit and not an impersonation.

This is happening because Elon Musk is abusing his rudimentary Twitter Blue verification process for profit and forcing false endorsement of a service to people who want nothing to do with it. So as a result, the implementation of it... and the intent of it... don't quite match.

Frankly I hope he gets a massive lawsuit for this.

I checked, the mormons can still baptize your loved ones after their death too.

I can see it now, after I dead I'm finally going to subscribe to Youtube TV, be counted for election redistricting, and vote for Moldova in Eurovision.

Where does it end?

I remember these ads were a bit controversial at the time: https://www.tampabay.com/archive/1997/01/09/astaire-taps-int...

Now I think it's pretty much expected estates will use celebrities to endorse products if it's appropriately tasteful (of course this is not tasteful).

It's impressive what you can do from beyond the grave!

This is such an improvement over the previous corrupt system where Twitter was giving the checkmarks for free to people they liked.

It's worse because they now give the checks to people they don't like.

And the checks imply endorsement of a paid service.

And the people getting checks don't want them.

It's such a mess, I don't even.

Twitter is such a clownshow now that Poe's law kicked in.

I wonder how he verified his phone number? /s

Duh, Twilio's new Ouija Board API

There has to be an allowlist of some sort of people allowed to keep blue ticks for free.

It would be terrible if someone from inside Twitter were to share it with the world. To repeat, please dont share the allowlist.

Lords and peasants, baby.

Finally, proof that Musk is Veppers from Surface Detail. How else do you explain his ready access to dead people?

Twitter pushed through some change to how blue checks are handed out, but hasn’t yet changed the blue check tooltip message. It’s an odd rhetorical stretch to say they’re actually claiming those dead celebrities subscribed.

http://isabevigodadead.com/ Looks like Abe is safe.

Looks like nobody here has heard of an Executor.

All of these accounts "subscribed" to Twitter Blue at the same time, it's obviously a change made by Twitter themselves. I doubt anyone even has custody of Bourdain or Norm Macdonald's accounts given their activity abruptly ends at the time of their deaths, accounts managed by a third party would usually post some kind of farewell message.

Most of these free checks are actual punishments for saying the checks were dumb. It's like the opposite of selling something.

Terry Pratchett's (a dead celebrity) might similarly be a punishment for his daughter saying she wouldn't get one. Bourdain wouldn't do this either.

Doesn’t make sense to me. The semantics of the Blue Check has changed from “anointed” to “subscriber”. If Boursin and others pointed out were critical, it was of the “anointed” model, simply because of the date of their personal demise.

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