Move fast and break things… no, that was the other guy.
Ah well, one TechBroBillionaire is very much like the next.
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Neither. You could always change your display name after getting verified, people are just using it to protest now.
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I have seen trolls playing with swapping lowercase l and uppercase I.
EIon.
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Worst online game ever.
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The only way to play Twitter is to never be the most talked-about player of the day.
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Oh absolutely, there have always been ones that do easily confused characters, or adding suffixes / prefixes etc.
But the ones that are verified and obviously not Elon like handles and have a long posting history are just using that long-standing hole. Jeph Jaques of Questionable Content is another doing it, along with Chris Kluwe that you asked about.
If there’s one of those with the look-alike characters that’s verified? Yeah, that’s a hack or serious screw-up.
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You could always change your display name, but verified users had no incentive to pretend to be someone else before—because that was the point of verification.
It used to be a huge problem for Twitter that anyone with a modest amount of fame (like the NFL punter/social activist shown above) could be convincingly imitated by anyone else for trolling or scamming purposes. The blue checks actually solved that problem for the most part.
So since anyone will be able to imitate Chris Kluwe again come next week (or so they say), he doesn’t have a lot of incentive to maintain his Twitter brand.
EDIT: I should add in Twitter’s defense that the fragments of their moderation team that survived the purge are still doing great work to protect us from misleading content… as long as it’s in the form of obvious parodies of Elon Musk.
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I enjoyed the exchange Musk had with a user, claiming that people were complaining that since users were metaphorically “the product”, making them pay would give them an actual product, instead. The user replied, “No, you’re just making us PAY to be your product.”
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She’s conflating the two senses of the word “free,” sure. Free as in freedoms vs. free as in beer.
But then so is Musk. Twitter is a private platform. The owner of it can under no circumstances do a single thing for or against “freedom of speech.”
He’s reinvented himself as a “free speech” advocate as the term is defined by the alt-right, which is that private companies* have no right to withhold money or advertising buys or attention or access from anyone**, and if they do, it’s censorship. That’s… one take on it, I suppose. And he’s “free” to spend $44 billion on a media platform to promote it, and charge anyone whatever the market will bear.
But then it is neither kind of “free,” and it’s fair to make fun of him for it.
* except Twitter, for the moment
** for certain values of “anyone”
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If we wanted to be really precise, it sounds like Musk is saying “free speech” means an $8/mo subscription plan in place of moderation. That he imagines it even sounds plausible one might do the work of the other seems like some combination of free as in market ideology and free as in association.
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I suppose it’s gauche to quote myself, but there’s breaking news. Scalzi’s latest blog post states pretty clearly he’s not leaving Twitter. This is pretty disappointing to me, honestly. He’s usually been a good ally, but this is a blatant move of choosing an adoring audience over doing the right thing for the world. Sigh.
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And more restrictions get added to the heap.
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I’ve always thought it was a terrible choice to put the check next to the display name instead of the handle
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Elon “I’m a reasonable man” Musk:
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“we will coup whoever we want” works both ways
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To be really, really precise, “Free Speech” to Muskovites means “Free From Consequences.”
So pesky to learn “normies” don’t really like hate speech or fascists all that much….
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