Twitter Blue Verified Impersonations / Parody Accounts

About

Twitter Blue Verified Impersonations or Twitter Blue Check Parody Accounts refers to a November 2022 wave of Twitter users spending $8 for a blue, "verified" checkmark in order to impersonate high-profile public figures and post misinformation as that figure. The wave is widely seen as a means to taunt Elon Musk's idea to incentivize people to spend money on the app by allowing them to pay $8 a month to be verified on Twitter. This made it so that both notable public figures and members of the general public could have Twitter's blue "verified" checkmark appear next to their name, with no immediately obvious visual distinction between the two. Memers took advantage of that to create "verified" accounts for notable public figures, including Musk himself, and then post confusing false statements and jokes. Scams also appeared using this method around the same timeframe.

Origin

On November 9th, 2022, Twitter, under Elon Musk's then-recent leadership, rolled out a feature that allowed users to pay $7.99 a month for verification, commonly known as the "blue checkmark."^[1] Under the previous system, the blue checkmark was only given to notable public figures as a means to ensure that they could not be impersonated on the app. Under this system, both notable public figures and paying members of the public receive the same blue check.

Twitter briefly toyed with adding a second, gray checkmark to distinguish notable public figures, but Musk killed the feature the same day.^[5] As of November 10th, users will have to go to a verified account's profile to see if a user is verified because they are a notable public figure or because they paid for verification.

Almost immediately after the feature was rolled out, some users began to take advantage of the system by purchasing verification and impersonating celebrities. One of the first notable impersonations was done by a user impersonating basketball star LeBron James, saying that the star was requesting a trade from Los Angeles to Cleveland. It was caught by reporter Ben Collins,^[2] who noted the tweet received thousands of likes and retweets before it was deleted by Twitter moderators.

Spread

Over the following day, many other Twitter users toyed with the system by purchasing a blue checkmark and using the verification badge to impersonate a celebrity. On November 10th, 2022, user @JoshuaPHilll^[3] posted a thread of some of the most notable impersonations from the previous day. These included impersonations of George W. Bush, Dave Chappelle, Rudy Giuliani and Elon Musk (examples shown below).

On November 9th, Twitter user @GillianDN^[4] posted a cryptocurrency scammer taking advantage of the new system by impersonating Twitter itself and attempting to get people to give up their crypto wallet information (shown below).

Various Examples

Search Interest

Unavailable.

External References