Twitter’s de-verification debacle, explained

polygon.com:

Formerly verified Twitter users watched their blue checkmarks flicker and fade out in real-time on Thursday, as the social media company pivots away from legacy checkmarks and towards its paid Twitter Blue policy. Elon Musk, who bought Twitter for $44 billion in November, has been dangling the promise of removing checkmarks from “legacy” verified accounts (a.k.a. people who had a checkmark for free) for months — freeing the social media platform from what Musk has called a “lords & peasants system.”

It’s gone as well as you’d expect, given Twitter’s recent history of chaotic rollouts. Anyone with $8 a month to spare and a phone number to verify their identity can purchase the verified checkmark. People affiliated with Twitter now get a square badge, and there are several other options for government accounts or big businesses, too. The Pope was briefly stripped of his blue checkmark on Thursday — harsh! — but it was replaced with a gray one on Friday, denoting a “government or multilateral organization,” for instance.

The short answer is yes. Almost immediately after the Twitter check finger snap, people started setting up fake profiles and impersonating formally official Twitter accounts. This was particularly troublesome for unverified government accounts, like that of New York City, which was immediately parodied. The official City of New York Twitter posted, saying that it was the authentic account, and another account, with a simple handle and the profile picture displaying the same NYC logo as the official account, responded disputing that it was, in fact, the real account. (The girls are fighting!)

Plenty of other parody jokes have come out of the mess, including a truly gross looking fake New York Times Cooking