Twitter Blue: Signups for Paid Verification Suspended after Impersonator Chaos

Forbes/

Twitter appears to have disabled new signups for its $8 per month subscriptions that allow users to receive a blue verification badge without actually authenticating their identity, as the rollout of the service triggered a flood of impersonator accounts and sowing chaos and confusion across the platform.

Although the platform has not issued an official statement about disabling the Twitter Blue service, Forbes has verified that users have not been able to sign up to the service for more than an hour.

The option to sign up for Twitter Blue has vanished for most users on Twitter’s iOS app, where the service launched this week.

Users who could still see an option to sign up for the service reportedly received an error prompt which asks them to check back later as the subscription is not presently available in their country.

This issue seems to be affecting users across the world, including in the U.S., where the service officially launched this week.

Earlier on Friday, the platform announced it was bringing back the gray official badge for some important accounts to combat impersonators, just two days after its rollout was “killed” by the company’s new owner and CEO Elon Musk.

The new updated Twitter Blue has been mired in controversy since its launch earlier this week. The service allows any user paying $8 a month to receive a verified Twitter badge without any actual authentication of their identity. This immediately led to a flurry of new “verified” users impersonating public figures and companies. Many of these impersonator accounts are hard to distinguish from the real thing on first glance and this has caused confusion among Twitter users with many mistakenly retweeting misinformation from these fake accounts.

One of the most high profile of these impersonators was a user who created a new verified account with the handle @EliLillyandCo and tweeted “we are excited to announce insulin is free now.” The fake tweet remained live on the website for several hours and gained a lot of traction prompting the drugmaker Eli Lilly and Co to issue a statement from their official handle @Lillypad saying: “We apologize to those who have been served a misleading message from a fake Lilly account.”

The fake account was eventually taken down, but several others soon emerged impersonating other major brands like Pepsi, Tesla, BP and organizations like AIPAC.

On Thursday night, Musk issued a fresh diktat on how Twitter will handle parody accounts going forward, noting that such accounts will need to mention the word “parody” in their display name, not just their Twitter bio, or they will be banned from the platform.

The billionaire however appeared to indicate he was enjoying the chaos, saying that he saw some “epically funny tweets.” Musk also said that Twitter is no longer “boring” and claimed the platform hit an “all-time high of active users” on Thursday.

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