How do you know if a Twitter profile is real or fake?

Twitter under Elon Musk is getting dumber.

Over the weekend, Twitter’s new management decided to withdraw its pledge on April 1 to remove “legacy” blue ticks, remnants of Twitter’s now-defunct system for verifying the identity of notable accounts. Instead, Twitter made a change that renders the blue checkmark functionally meaningless.

Users can no longer see if an account has a blue check mark because it has been verified or because the account owner is paying for it with a Twitter Blue subscription. Twitter has changed the tooltip that appears when you tap the badge on a Twitter profile to read the exact same thing no matter how the check was obtained: “This account has been verified because it subscribes to Twitter Blue or is an out-of-date verified account. ” The whole thing feels motivated by stupidity, pettiness or a sad combination of both.

To determine if an account actually belongs to who it claims to belong to, you may need to do a little extra digging. Fortunately, it’s not that hard to tell who’s real and who’s not.

Check the handle

Despite the changes and confusion over the weekend, Twitter’s official policy(Opens in a new tab) with regard to the blue check, staying consistent with the vision Musk has laid out for the site. Per the rules, the badge is for Twitter Blue members, with legacy accounts losing it at some point. Maybe.

Oddly enough, the only major account losing its check mark right now is the official New York Times account(Opens in a new tab). Again the word “small” comes to mind.

In any case, if you see an account claiming to belong to a well-known person or organization, but you’re not sure if it’s real, check the username first. I mean the one with an @ sign in front, not the display name. If an account has the same avatar and display name as someone else, but the @ entrance is completely different, you have a fake account.

Example: An account has the New York Times avatar and display name, but the handle is something arbitrary, such as a person’s name. That’s fake.

A nice little bonus factor of the new rules is that now people with ticks can’t just change their handles or display their name to impersonate others. If you change any of these things, you’ll temporarily lose the badge until Twitter decides you meet the eligibility criteria again. At least that’s what the rules say. Who knows how any of these things will actually be enforced.

Look at the number of followers

In this world where the presence of a tick doesn’t really mean anything, we have to look at other parts of a profile to decide whether or not an account is trustworthy. When it comes to big celebrities, news organizations or brands, it is always easy to distinguish fraud from the genuine article by looking at the number of followers.

Simply put, a fake New York Times Twitter account will not have a few hundred or even a few thousand followers. The real one has 55 million followers, and you probably have a few mutuals in that list, which you can see on his profile. The same goes for pretty much any obsolete verified account worth impersonating. The New York Times, LeBron James and any other famous account will have hundreds of thousands or even millions of followers.

Another thing to look at when checking your follower count is when the account was created. Each profile tells you when it was registered right under its bio. Anyone ripe for impersonation has probably been on the site for a decade or more. Anyone impersonating may have created the account last week.

It takes two seconds to check this. Don’t be the one who forgets.

And finally, just read tweets

The last piece of advice I have for you if you’re not sure if an account is real or not is pretty simple: just read the tweets.

Let’s go back to the Times example, since it lost its check mark. If you can’t tell at a glance whether an account belongs to the newspaper or is an impostor, go to the account and scroll down. If it’s the real account, chances are you’ll see a ton of links to New York Times stories, and presumably those links actually go to the stories described in the tweets.

If instead you see spammy tweets or anything else that is not befitting a major newspaper, that is probably not the real deal. The same principle applies to any other well-known person or organization. If the fake account (which again likely has a low follower count) tweets things that the real account owner probably wouldn’t tweet, feel free to ignore them.

Unless they’ve been hacked, because that’s what’s happening now. Such is life on Twitter after Musk.