Twitter is more worried about people changing their name to Elon Musk than Nazi hate speech
Has the social media giant really got its priorities right?
A thing that some people do on the internet - specifically on Twitter - is pretend to be Elon Musk. Why do they do this? Well, because Elon Musk is very rich, so by impersonating him and offering lucky Twitter users the chance to get in on one of his get-rich-quick schemes, they can scam them out of all their lovely cash. It’s quite obvious to those that know what a “load of shit” looks like, but some people still fall for these online fraudsters.
So what Twitter is doing is blocking any account that has “Elon Musk” in the user name (apart from the real one, regardless of how many “pedo” insults he hurls about the shop), to combat the fraud.
A Twitter spokesperson told The Verge:
“As part of our continuing efforts to combat spam and malicious activity on our service, we’re testing new measures to challenge accounts that use terms commonly associated with spam campaigns. We are continually refining these detections based on changes in spammy activity.
“This is an evolving challenge. As such, we’re rapidly developing our response to be more agile and effective in detecting these behaviors and enforcing our policies — particularly as it relates to deceptive cryptocurrency accounts in violation of our spam rules.”
Of course, this news has only meant that Twitter has responded in the only way it knows how:
Related
- This is the bizarre, epic war of words between Elon Musk and the British Thai cave rescuer
- Elon Musk has apologised for calling Thai rescue diver a ‘pedo’ (but says he started it)
- A robot with artificial intelligence has gone to space and this isn’t going to end well
Not only are they “doing a joke” and getting round the rule by changing their accounts to hilarious names like “Elhon Musque”, they’re also making an extremely valid point that Twitter seem to be putting all their effort into stopping specific “Elon Musk” accounts, yet allowing noted Nazis to remain on Twitter.
Sure, it’s great cracking down on cyber-crime, but you know, can’t you use the same technology to crack down on other terrible areas of the internet? Like, erm, Nazis?
Who knows if Twitter will actually implement this - it’s probably a good idea they do though, eh? EH TWITTER? PROBS A GOOD IDEA THAT YOU DO.
(Image: Getty)
