Gaming giant copycats fan fire of Twitter verification outrage as Blue rollout begins

It’s the dawn of a new age for Twitter where anyone with $8 USD can get a verified badge on their profile. This used to be a badge that proved public officials were who they say they were, but under Musk it has become something that’s purchasable.

This means anyone can pretend to be an official brand on Twitter—if they’ve got a few bucks lying around—and at least a few have already begun to do just that.

While this was brought up by many over the weekend, Twitter has been inundated with users pretending to be major gaming accounts.

These accounts are posting fake release announcements, characters in positions that don’t support the brand, and other misinformation. Fortunately, many of the gaming impersonators seem to be attempting to make a point.

One example includes a picture of Mario from a fake Nintendo of America Twitter account with his middle finger raised. There’s no text and the image might even make a funny meme if it didn’t look like it was the official Nintendo page posting it. The tweet managed to get somewhere around 20,000 likes before the account was suspended by Twitter’s moderation team.

Another example includes a fake Valve profile posting an announcement for “Ricochet: Neon Prime,” which is supposedly the company’s “next competitive platform.”

This account even looks to have the same @handle as the official company, with the T and F in “software” switched. Paired with the verified badge next to its name, this would likely fool plenty of people before Twitter caught on.

When asked in a recent conference call on Twitter about what Musk will do to combat these fake verified accounts, he said they will be less incentivized to do it when the accounts are banned and Twitter keeps their money.

But, this just means anyone running a scam that can budget $10 a day can just come back with a new fake verified Twitter daily.

With no other plan other than to squash each account as it arises, this likely does not bode well for the future of brands on Twitter. One would think that a company that’s seeing its brand damaged on the site will have to weigh the pros and cons of whether or not to keep a presence and ad space on the website.

If anyone can make a fake account and pretend to be that brand, one has to wonder why the actual individuals would remain. With many people losing thousands of followers since Musk took over, it could be that this drives another swath of users from the site.