Elon Musk is rolling out Twitter's new verification system, allowing pretty much anyone with $8 to throw away to grab themselves a coveted blue tick. This is despite many, many users worried about an increase in impersonation attempts, as a blue checkmark previously allowed users to quickly discern whether a piece of information tweeted out is legitimate or not. Musk has maintained that Twitter will crack down hard on impersonation attempts, but not hard enough it seems.
As pretty much everyone in the gaming industry expected, several Twitter users have been impersonating massive game companies such as Rockstar, Valve, and Nintendo of America, each one with varying degrees of success. The fake Rockstar account attempted to trick people into thinking the next game in the GTA series was going to be announced on November 18, although the tweet itself failed to pick up any traction before it was removed.
The fake Nintendo of America account was much less subtle about pretending to be Nintendo itself. Instead of tricking people, the user simply tweeted out a picture of Mario flipping the bird, presumably at Twitter and Elon Musk. That tweet has now been taken down too, but it took Twitter almost two hours and waiting until the tweet exploded in popularity for it to notice. The tweet itself was saved and shared by Bloomberg's Jason Schreier.
The last fake account – at the moment anyway – is a user impersonating Valve, tricking people into thinking that the mysterious 'Neon Prime' trademark the company filed was actually the name of a Richochet sequel. Surprisingly, this tweet is still up at the time of writing, even after the user directly called out Elon Musk in a separate tweet about how easy it is now to spread misinformation.
It's likely these won't be the only impersonation attempts and we can expect more in the future, even if Twitter decides to crack down harder on this type of trickery. That means you'll need to be a lot more vigilant about future announcements on the platform, so stay safe out there gamers.
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