Celebrity
Twitter Permanently Suspends Kathy Griffin’s Account For Impersonating Elon Musk
“Any name change at all will cause temporary loss of verified checkmark.”
The ban hammer is in full swing as several users with blue checkmarks have been s”permanently suspended” by the new owner of the social media platform, Elon Musk. The billionaire doesn’t look entertained with multiple accounts impersonating him and tweeting troll content not long after he began rolling out his plans of changing the platform.
Musk spent $44 billion to buy Twitter and after it was finalized, among some of the radical he was making was completely revamping the blue checkmark into a subscription feature.
Kathy Griffin, 62, took the opportunity as a comedian to begin parodying Elon Musk, along with several other accounts. She became a casualty almost at the same time as the other accounts, and while Musk stated that accounts “clearly specifying ‘parody’” will be spared, that doesn’t seem to be the case.
He tweeted, “Going forward, any Twitter handles engaging in impersonation without clearly specifying “parody” will be permanently suspended.”
She’s joined the one million users who’re now gone from the social media platform, along with Gigi Hadid, who left just a day ago over her dissatisfaction with the “new leadership.”
Musk claims that by selling out the blue checkmark at $8 a month, he’ll be “democratizing” the service and allowing more voices to be heard. The service is said to be first launched in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the UK but no actual date has been announced as of yet.
Griffin jumped to another account and this time, made sure to clear up that it was a parody. But the account was banned just as soon.
With so many migrating off the platform, users are switching to alternatives such as Mastodon and Counter Social as their new social nest. It won’t be hard to imagine that a number of coders and employees who were laid off just this month have been lining up at their doorstep. Many advertisers have also held back from continuing on putting their ads in fear of even more radical changes.
Twitter’s head of safety and integrity Yoel Roth attempted to reassure investors that their department was the least affected, but that hadn’t seen any positive results.
He’s also constantly updating the terms and tweeted the newest one, “Any name change at all will cause temporary loss of verified checkmark.”
Twitter has over 237 million users and only 450k of them are verified. Laid-off employees have also filed for a class-action lawsuit as Musk had broken the 60-day notice regulation, which is the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act, before firing them.
