Twitter suspends payment for verification after chaos due to torrent of scammers | technology

Pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly fell more than 4% in the stock market Friday after it announced on Twitter that insulin was now free. It just wasn’t Eli Lilly. It was an account with that name verified by Twitter with the blue tick it now gives to those who pay $7.99 a month. The loss in value for the company was even greater: about $14,000 million (a similar amount in euros) in one day.

Elon Musk’s rush caused Twitter to launch its own blue check mark payment service without the proper filters. The social network is filled with celebrities with a blue tick who are, in fact, scammers. Fake verified LeBron James asked to leave the Los Angeles Lakers. Lockheed Martin announced that it has stopped selling weapons to the United States, Israel and Saudi Arabia and plunged 5% in the stock market. The new George W. Bush said he “misses killing Iraqis.” There is even a “verified” Jesus Christ. The chaos unleashed by the blue tick scammers has led the company to suspend the option, though no one knows for how long.

Twitter has not made any official announcement about this. The company launched its blue tick subscription service last weekend. He then suspended it to prevent false allegations from interfering in last Tuesday’s legislative elections. After the election, he returned to the charge, but was associated with the distinction between blue (paid) and gray (official) marks. At first, Esther Crawford, Twitter Product Managerhe said the gray flag was for “government accounts, companies, business partners, major media outlets, publishers and some public figures,” but that in less than 24 hours Musk decided to exclude the media and personalities.

That was a small incident besides the chaos on the network with the scammer’s accounts. It turns out that the businessman, who complained about the number of bots and fake accounts on Twitter, now has verified fake accounts in which companies and personalities are being impersonated. “It is not right to deceive people,” he said in a letter, referring to the satirical accounts.

Twitter has not reported that it has suspended the option to opt in with a blue tick and can resume it at any time. The billionaire tweeted a smiley emoji to the message that although the account was suspended, the company kept the money paid. It’s not clear whether companies like Eli Lilly, Lockheed Martin, Nintendo, BP or Chiquita, or some of the companies that have been replaced, or advertisers, will be very entertaining.

After the blue and gray ticks incident, Musk justified himself: “Keep in mind Twitter is going to be doing a lot of silly things in the coming months. We’ll leave what works and change what doesn’t. That trial and error method is already beginning to show its dangers.”

Mask has given social network engineers and programmers an ultimatum to have a new subscription system ready in less than a week. From the start, the great unknown is what to do with scammers. The billionaire just announced that sarcastic accounts have to say they are, and verified usernames will not be allowed to change. Obviously, the system did not work.

Twitter was responsible before verifying the identity of the verified accounts, which typically correspond to politicians, artists, journalists, personalities, businesses, governments and organizations. This system of control disappeared when Musk, the world’s richest man, bought the social network and declared: “Power to the people.”

journalist from Washington Post Agree with Massachusetts Democratic Senator Edward J. He had no problem doing that. Markie wrote a letter to Musk, which was quoted by the newspaper: “Apparently, due to Twitter’s lax verification practices and a clear need for money, anyone could pay $8 and impersonate someone else on their platform. Selling the truth is dangerous and unacceptable.”

The billionaire warned his employees that the company’s bankruptcy cannot be ruled out due to their miscalculation. Advertisers en masse fled the emergence of racist, sexist and homophobic messages soon after Mask purchased the network and while waiting for a new content modification policy to be defined. In addition, the founder of Tesla, SpaceX, and PayPal, among other companies, put the company on $13,000 million in debt as part of the purchase, so he doesn’t have to shell out much of his own pocket. But the cash generated by the company is not even enough to pay the interest on this debt.

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