Twitter: Nintendo and Valve Fake Accounts Cause Confusion – News

Twitter has made a lot of headlines in the past few days. Now, recent changes to the social media platform’s verification system have seen more and more fake accounts popping up. Including accounts from Valve and Nintendo. The accounts presumably allowed themselves to be verified by paying a fee, so they have a blue tick next to the profile name. But they have nothing to do with the companies and so create confusion. For example, a fake Valve account called @valvesotfware (note the twisted letters in the name) has aloud kotaku the game Ricochet-Neon Prime announced and a Nintendo look-alike made a similar attempt by announcing a Switch version of Super Mario Galaxy undertaken.

The situation came about because of the sometimes drastic changes after the takeover of Twitter Elon Musk. In his efforts to reform the platform, he initially brought back accounts that had already been banned, whereupon corporate customers in particular made negative comments and shut down or terminated their advertising contracts with Twitter. Musk countered the slump in revenue by laying off many employees, temporarily paralyzing important areas. The subscription model, in which eight US dollars per month will be required for verification in the future, was rejected by existing customers and has recently caused fraudulent Twitter accounts to be falsely verified as official. The attempt to integrate a second verification hook also failed after a few hours.

Twitter moderators are trying to get the situation under control and some of the accounts have so far been deleted. For the time being, however, more caution is warranted on Twitter and it is not yet clear how the situation will develop.