Twitter users have been taking a long ride over the past few days when it comes to the location verification system.
On Thursday, Elon Musk Removal Legacy validated blue ticks from users who received it before it was inherited. Then it startedDedicationTwitter Blue verified badges of certain celebrities who have publicly said they would not pay $8 to keep their checkmarks. Over the weekend, he began to Progressing Twitter Blue Subscriptions for notable users talking about #BlockTheBlue (including the author of this piece). Then he just went ahead gave them To almost every Twitter user with over 1 million followers.
And these are just blue ticks. During this whole debacle, Twitter removed gold check marks, a badge that Musk gave to organizations and businesses, from business accounts. The company quickly let these companies know that it would get those gold checkmarks back—which cost some of these users $1,000 a month—as quickly as possible.
Well, it appears that while doing this, Twitter verified the wrong account. And not just any miscalculation. Twitter has verified a fake Disney account that appears to have been created specifically for phishing.
On Monday morning, Twitter users noticed that the DisneyJuniorUK account had received a gold check mark, a sign that Twitter had verified an account owned by the company as official on the platform.
One problem: DisneyJuniorUK is not an official Disney account. According to the account owner, Twitter user @7virtues_, they set it up again in 2021(Opens in a new tab) It is often used for dirt.
The tweet may have been deleted
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Twitter eventually suspended the entire account this morning, but not before @DisneyJuniorUK had fun with it newly acquired(Opens in a new tab) Golden checkmark.
The tweet may have been deleted
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“No fucking way,” @DisneyJuniorUK tweeted when it first realized the account had been verified. “Isn’t that really true? Someone is pinching me or something.”
Users quickly verify that it’s real by clicking the golden checkmark and seeing who’s responsible a description(Opens in a new tab) from the account.
The tweet may have been deleted
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Then DisneyJuniorUK posting really started. Among a few random tweets, the account completely pretended to be a Disney profile with a tweet(Opens in a new tab) Claiming that South Park was coming to Disney’s streaming network, Disney+.
The tweet may have been deleted
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Readers, we can confirm that South Park is definitely not coming to Disney+.
Anyway, this whole thing only lasted a few hours before Twitter pulled the plug. But, it just goes to show that it’s getting harder for users to trust what they see on Twitter now. Even for Twitter itself.