So the latest news freakout over Elon Musk buying twitter is that he is banning people impersonating him:
And so on. Lots of lefties are screeching that this means Musk is opposed to free speech.
Here’s the thing, though. The accounts getting banned are “Blue Checks.” You will see a little blue check mark next to some Twitter accounts; these accounts have been verified through some process to be actually who they say they are. This might be a corporate account like Ford or Lockheed; this might be the President of the United States; this might be a journalist or an actor. For most people it doesn’t really matter. But if you’re making Big Money on Twitter and you want to make sure that people know that they can trust that You are in fact You, I guess that little blue check mark is important.
Great, whatever.
But the moment you take your blue check account and change the name to someone else’s – like, say, “Elon Musk” – and then start making posts impersonating that other person, you are committing fraud. The blue check is supposed to say that You are You, not You are Some Other Person.
So, it’s simple. If you want to have a parody account, great, go right ahead. Just don’t use your already established “blue check” to try to fool people into thinking you are someone else. I’m not sure how this was even supposed to be controversial.
And there is another issue with the “blue check verification.” It is supposed to be proof that you are who you say you are, and it is supposed to be an impartial procedure. But there are accusations that the verification was refused sometimes unless you paid someone a bribe. And the bribes were reportedly not small. For a celebrity, fifteen grand might be chump change; but for journalists or “lesser” notables, it was a lot of money. But it would have been worth the price for that little blue check mark. It might even have been *necessary* in some fields, like journalism. In some respects, it’s like a drivers license… needed to do your job, open and available to everyone on a supposedly even playing field. So finding that *anyone* can be verified for a mere eight buck after you blew fifteen large? Yeah, that’s gotta grate.
