The Funniest Twitter Impersonations To Sum Up The Storm
Elon Musk, the owner, CEO and punching bag of Twitter, is still straight up not having a good time. Musk’s splashy plan to sell blue checks for $8 per month crashed and burned at record speed as he was forced to pull the service from the platform just two days after its launch following the ruthless trolling and blue-check abuse that dominated the site for those glorious 48 hours.
After D-List comedian Kathy Griffin changed her Twitter handle to Elon Musk and sent out a series of derogatory tweets about the mogul, a flood of professional and amateur internet comedians rushed to get in on the joke, and once those coveted blue checks were available for just $8, no celebrity, company or country was safe from a humorous hoax.
The onslaught of verified falsehoods has targeted everyone from politicians to companies to sports figures, with beat writers for the MLB and the NBA falling for some of the popular frauds that have been floating around.
While most users on the spiraling platform have been laughing about the loopholes that allow users to change their usernames after getting that blue mark of authenticity and then spout falsehoods, others are more concerned about the implications of the disinformation being spread. But again, for the moment at least, most people were just laughing.
Sadly, the floodgates have since been closed on these funny fraudulent posts, with the platform rolling back the abused option to add blue checks to anyone who ponied up eight bucks. Advertisers had already been fleeing Twitter following a disturbing rise in hate speech and an exponential growth in use of slurs — it turns out that those responsible for an Oreos ad campaign don’t want people to see a picture of a kid dunking a cookie in milk sandwiched between an anti-Semitic conspiracy post and a tweet that’s just someone writing the n-word 38 times.
If the self-proclaimed “greatest President America has ever known” is correct and these fraudsters all manage to charge back the $8 they spent to publicly embarrass Lockheed Martin, LeBron James, and most of all, the Twitter CEO himself, then the colossal failure of Twitter Blue may be the gasoline that turns this dumpster fire into a full on inferno.
These online arsonists may never be allowed to tweet again, but their contributions to the insanity and chaos of Musk’s fully off-the-rails Twitter tenure will never be forgotten as long as our screenshot folders remain intact. Thank you, Twitter fraud accounts, for making the downfall of social media so much fun.
