Billionaire crybaby Elon Musk decided to make “verified” blue checkmarks meaningless by offering them for $8 a month to whomever may want one, and now a terrorist organization is, of course, taking advantage of this.
The Taliban, which recently banned girls and women from attending school beyond sixth grade and women from working at NGOs in Afghanistan and has been murdering former women members of Parliament, recently had several verified accounts on Twitter, according to a Monday BBC report. Two Taliban officials and four prominent supporters had the checkmarks on Monday, and one supporter even tweeted “Thank you @elonmusk for buying twitter. Elon Musk in making twitter great again,” mirroring the slogan of former President Donald Trump.
Musk claimed the paid verification program would restore “power to the people,” but it mostly lead to people impersonating brands and public figures. After the disastrous (and, yes, sometimes funny) rollout of Twitter Blue, Twitter had to pause the paid verification program to figure shit out. While impersonation is now banned, it appears there’s no way to stop literal terrorists from paying the fee and getting a blue check.
Twitter Blue isn’t only about getting the checkmark—the paid service also gives subscribers “priority ranking in search, mentions, and replies,” which Twitter said was an effort “to help lower the visibility of scams, spam and bots.” But in this case, it just seems to be boosting the messages of terrorists and their supporters.
The BBC reporter, Abdirahim Saeed, said on Tuesday that two Taliban officials had lost their blue checks since publication, but a third had gained one. Saeed said it wasn’t clear if Twitter revoked the badges or if the officials themselves deactivated the feature.
Twitter did not respond to Saeed’s requests for comment, but also Musk had fired most of the company’s communications team. This is all going great.