Twitter: why is it hard to believe in the blue badges? – 04/27/2023 – Tech

In the 24 hours after Twitter last week removed the blue verification badge that historically served as a means of identifying public bodies, at least 11 new accounts began impersonating the Los Angeles Police Department.

More than 20 pretended to be various agencies of the United States federal government. Someone claiming to be the mayor of New York City promised to create a Department of Traffic and Parking Enforcement and cut the police budget by 70%.

Elon Musk’s decision to stop giving authenticity marks to people and groups verified as being who they say they are, and instead offering them to anyone who pays for one of these tokens, is the latest blunder on Twitter, the social network he has vowed to remake since he acquired it last year for $44 billion.

The changes have convulsed a platform that once seemed indispensable for following news as it breaks. Information on Twitter today is less and less reliable. Accounts impersonating authorities, government agencies and celebrities proliferated. So has propaganda and disinformation, which threaten to further undermine trust in public institutions. The consequences are just beginning to surface.

Alyssa Kahn, research associate at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Lab, said Twitter under Musk is systematically dismantling safeguards that have been put in place through years of evaluation and discussion.

“When there are too many things going wrong at once, it’s like, which fire do you put out first?” she said.

After a public dispute with NPR (National Public Radio), which Twitter falsely labeled as a “state-affiliated media outlet,” the platform last week removed all labels identifying state-owned media, including those controlled by authoritarian countries. such as Russia, China and Iran.

That, along with the decision to stop blocking recommendations for these accounts, coincided with increased engagement on many of them, according to research by the Digital Forensics Research Lab and another organization that studies misinformation, London-based Reset.

In Sudan, new Twitter accounts falsely represent both sides of the country’s civil war. An account that allegedly purchased a blue verification stamp falsely proclaimed the death of rebel leader Lieutenant General Mohamed Hamdan of the Rapid Support Forces. More than 1.7 million people viewed the tweet.

Twitter’s new director of trust and safety, Ella Irwin, did not respond to a request for comment on the changes and their consequences.

Twitter has always been a source of misinformation, or worse, but past policies have tried to inform readers about the sources of content and limit the most harmful instances. The debut of authenticated accounts on the social network in 2009 is generally associated with Tony La Russa, a major league baseball director who sued Twitter for trademark infringement and other claims after having a fake profile posted on the platform.

Over time, authenticated accounts with blue seals pointed users to official sources and real people. Labeling news organizations as state outlets indicated that the reports reflected a certain point of view.

Forgers became a problem almost immediately after Musk took over in November and offered to sell the stamps to anyone who paid a monthly fee. He backtracked after companies like Eli Lilly and PepsiCo ran into trouble with seemingly verified fake accounts promising free insulin or praising Coke’s superiority.

Last week, Twitter began removing blue ticks from companies, government agencies, news organizations and others that didn’t agree to pay. It appears that many opted out, although Twitter did not release numbers.

Some applauded the changes.

“Now you can even find me in search,” tweeted Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of RT, the Russian state television network that has been accused of rampant disinformation and hate speech directed at Ukraine. She signed the tweet saying: “Brotherly, Elon @elonmusk, from the heart.”

Twitter’s algorithms previously excluded accounts labeled as government officials or state media from recommendations, decreasing engagement. According to Reset, 124 accounts belonging to Russian state media received an average of 33% more exposure in views and impressions after the changes, which took effect at the end of March.

Among them are accounts such as that of Dmitri A. Medvedev, former president of Russia and vice chairman of the country’s security council, who posted a distorted photograph of US President Joe Biden on Tuesday (25), calling -o in English for “bold old man”.

When one account argued this month that Twitter was amplifying Russia’s genocidal propaganda against Ukraine, Musk responded dismissively: “All news is propaganda to some extent. Let people decide for themselves.” (The account he was responding to has since been suspended.)

Researchers said the sudden changes in how seals of authenticity are obtained threaten to create confusion, at the very least. They can also undermine confidence in a communication tool during crises such as natural disasters.

The Los Angeles Police Department’s main account has a gray verification badge, which Twitter created for “traditional accounts [legacy]”, but not all of their agencies have it – the Hollywood division, for example.

In addition to providing blue verification badges for $8 a month, Twitter invited organizations to pay $1,000 to receive gold badges for multiple accounts. For awhile at least, one of those was bestowed on an imposter named @DisneyJuniorUk.

“This is going to be chaos for emergency services,” tweeted Marc-André Argentino, a researcher at the London-based International Center for the Study of Radicalization.

Argentino tracked examples showing an account posing as the mayor of Chicago responding to another posing as the city’s Department of Transportation. In another, the real New York City government account argued with an imposter.

“Yes this is funny let’s all laugh,” wrote Argentino. “Now, take two seconds and think back to some high-casualty incident in a big city, or a natural disaster, or any critical crisis/incident, when people turn to official sources of information in times of need, and think of the harm it does. can cause.”

On Friday (21), the daughter of comedian George Carlin, Kelly Carlin, tweeted a complaint that someone was impersonating the account she manages for her late father, using the same profile picture and claiming to be her.

“IT STARTS HERE,” she wrote, after several unsuccessful attempts to remove the imposter account, complaining that “Twitter is broken.” The fake account was still active on Wednesday (26), with nine followers.

Josh Boerman, who co-hosts a pop culture podcast, “The Worst of All Possible Worlds,” was the originator of New York City Mayor Eric Adams’ bogus account promising to create a DMV and parking lot and cut city funding. police.

Boerman said he went out of his way to leave obvious signs that he was a copycat. His tweet included unrealistic scenarios where police officers’ guns were melted down and sold for scrap metal, with the proceeds going to the parks department. He invented an organization with a ridiculous name: the Porcine Benefit Association of New York City. And he promoted his podcast to his relatively small Twitter audience of 1,700 users.

“Virtually everyone understood right away that it was a joke, which I hoped — I wasn’t trying to fool anyone,” Boerman said. “The thing is, this could be as much a joke about where the network is right now as it is an opportunity to think about the way the media is broadcast and what we think about our public figures.”

Removing the blue checkmarks caused “immediate and pure chaos,” but the novelty wore off, he said. His profile name is now “bosh (no longer mayor)”. He said he is careful to confirm any advertisements he sees on Twitter using other sources.

“The problem is when accounts that can have hundreds of thousands of followers position themselves as real,” Boerman said. “Twitter’s approach of ‘Well if people pay for verification, they must surely be legit’ is so ridiculous I don’t even know how to put it into words.”

Translated by Luiz Roberto M. Gonçalves