Government Imposters Run Wild on Twitter

Impersonating others has been a hallmark of social media since its inception.  In particular, Twitter has always been ripe for imitation.  Whether it was a parody or people were intentionally trying to mislead others, there were a flood of handles that read “@realcelebrityname,” that were so ubiquitous that even former president Donald Trump’s Twitter account was @realdonaldtrump.

The social media site used its staff to determine which accounts were associated with noteworthy groups like governments or celebrities.  Since then, power-user Elon Musk purchased the site and has been implementing changes at a frenzied pace.  One of the most recent and impactful changes was to remove legacy blue verification checkmarks, with only subscribers to the platform receiving the verified check.

This meant that everyone from LeBron James to the Pope lost their verification tick, creating a flood of imposters who used the confusion to spread misinformation.  It’s not just celebrities that are being impersonated though, as numerous phony government accounts popped up, sporting a checkmark and making outrageous claims while the real accounts tried to correct things.

Fake government accounts purporting to be from Chicago and New York posted about banning cars on their roads and switching political parties.  In the grand scheme of things, these are pretty innocuous fabrications (although maybe don’t mention that to the enraged commentariat who thought they were real), but there is a serious potential for harm here in the case of an emergency.

The imposter accounts from the linked article were taken down after being reported but the manual nature of correcting things means that there is a window for bad actors to operate within.

Over the weekend, verification checkmarks were applied to the most popular accounts on the site (the early consensus is that any account with more than a million followers received the mark), but it seems the opaque nature in which they were applied had only added to confusion on the site.  Some government bodies like the National Weather Service do have an alternate color verification that indicates they are real, many of their local affiliates do not.  The myriad of state, county, and local accounts create a challenge because of both their volume and in their ease of impersonation.

This isn’t necessarily a new problem though, as National Association of Counties CIO Rita Reynolds noted, “Fake government accounts have been a concern of local governments for quite some time.”  She pointed government organizations looking for help to the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center, which is a federally funded program that provides free services to its members.

Both governments and citizens will need to step up their game to combat misinformation.  If you’re reading something that looks a bit suspicious, there are certainly a few steps you can take to confirm things before reacting to or spreading the information.

• Go to the official government website to find a second source of the information.  Alternatively, see if their social media accounts are posted on their website and confirm you’re following the correct accounts.

• Look at the username closely.  Lowercase l’s and capital i’s are often used interchangeably (“CITY”-“ClTY”) to confuse users.

• Click into the profile.  See how many followers the account has, when it was created, and whether or not it’s used.  It’s unlikely that any government office’s first post will be regarding something controversial or safety-related and it’s also unlikely that your local government will have just a handful of followers or an astronomical amount.

If things look fishy, always go to the source!