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>These "impersonations" are flimsy paper masks of Elon's face with the eyes cut out so you can see through. Debatable. If I go on a major Mastadon instance and

>These "impersonations" are flimsy paper masks of Elon's face with the eyes cut out so you can see through. Debatable. If I go on a major Mastadon instance and impersonate an admin or a top celebrity there will I get banned? If I do, should I expect much sympathy if I accuse the relevant admins of throwing a tantrum? Can I go on a major Mastadon instance and pretend to be a politician up for re-election and start making claims in hopes of damaging their electoral prospects? It just strikes me as implausible that the people who are accusing Musk of being thin-skinned here actually believe that this sort of impersonation is defensible behavior. I guess it's reminiscent of the people who pearl-clutch about political violence but also were okay with Griffith doing a photoshoot posing with Trump's bloody decapitated head.

maxbond 4y ago
Have you spent very much time on Twitter? Lots of people have silly names like this. You quickly learn to use people's handles & the verified check mark. This is very much parody that is normal on Twitter & which most people would immediately recognize.
- theonething 4y ago
  > Lots of people have silly names like this Problem is Kathy didn't change her name to something that clearly indicated parody. She just changed it to "Elon Musk" a clear violation of Twitter policy that existed way before Elon got involved.
Apocryphon 4y ago
Twitter "impersonations" have been around forever and are easily spotted from a mile away. If anything they are a fun social engineering hack of that platform's outdated UI and bizarre lack of oversight on already-verified accounts.
socialismisok 4y ago
None of those things are this thing. You don't need overwrought hypotheticals because all of these things are satire or parody. They are extremely obvious parody. The people doing Bitcoin scams are impersonating Musk, fine, ban those if you want. But it's patently absurd to call changing your handle to Elon Musk "impersonation".
- yanderekko 4y ago
  They're doing more than changing the handle. Again, if someone were impersonating say the White House and making outrageous statement I doubt people would just be like "it's obvious, just let them have their fun."
  - socialismisok 4y ago
    I think you must not use Twitter, what you describe is extremely common. And yes, I omitted that they also changed their profile picture. But their @id is still stamped right on top of every tweet.
  - Apocryphon 4y ago
    Accounts do that sometimes and it's funny as hell
  - Brian_K_White 4y ago
    They do and they do. And again, this can't be called impersonation in the first place anyway because it's merely a well-known meaningless free-form text field of no actual value or consequence. The display name is not the actual identifier. They aren't trying to say, register a new account that appears to come from a whitehouse.gov domain email, supply the SSN of a real whitehouse employee, etc. Or Elon in this case. It's just a free-form text field that can be changed at any time to any thing, and so is no more than a decoration. And importantly, everyone knows this. It's not some new hack that someone discovered that was not an intentionally designed part of the ui. For example, if that field were meant to be taken literally and seriously, then why did Twitter write it as a free-form field, and allow people to write literally anything in there, as in, animals and random objects and words, and unpronouncable strings in any language? They wrote their own ui, they could have made that a static value if they wanted. "Your argument is invalid"
    - yanderekko 4y ago
      >And importantly, everyone knows this. Do they though? I mean, I'm open to being convinced but just asserting this isn't very compelling. Why were there pre-existing rules governing the use of this field if this behavior was completely harmless? Saying "it's a free form field therefore no one should ever trust it" as a general principle seems like a stretch. Lots of web services separate display names from underlying IDs and allow flexibility in using the former, with some reasonable restrictions.

maxbond 4y ago

Have you spent very much time on Twitter? Lots of people have silly names like this. You quickly learn to use people's handles & the verified check mark. This is very much parody that is normal on Twitter & which most people would immediately recognize.

theonething 4y ago
> Lots of people have silly names like this Problem is Kathy didn't change her name to something that clearly indicated parody. She just changed it to "Elon Musk" a clear violation of Twitter policy that existed way before Elon got involved.

Apocryphon 4y ago

Twitter "impersonations" have been around forever and are easily spotted from a mile away. If anything they are a fun social engineering hack of that platform's outdated UI and bizarre lack of oversight on already-verified accounts.

socialismisok 4y ago

None of those things are this thing. You don't need overwrought hypotheticals because all of these things are satire or parody. They are extremely obvious parody. The people doing Bitcoin scams are impersonating Musk, fine, ban those if you want. But it's patently absurd to call changing your handle to Elon Musk "impersonation".

yanderekko 4y ago
They're doing more than changing the handle. Again, if someone were impersonating say the White House and making outrageous statement I doubt people would just be like "it's obvious, just let them have their fun."
- socialismisok 4y ago
  I think you must not use Twitter, what you describe is extremely common. And yes, I omitted that they also changed their profile picture. But their @id is still stamped right on top of every tweet.
- Apocryphon 4y ago
  Accounts do that sometimes and it's funny as hell
- Brian_K_White 4y ago
  They do and they do. And again, this can't be called impersonation in the first place anyway because it's merely a well-known meaningless free-form text field of no actual value or consequence. The display name is not the actual identifier. They aren't trying to say, register a new account that appears to come from a whitehouse.gov domain email, supply the SSN of a real whitehouse employee, etc. Or Elon in this case. It's just a free-form text field that can be changed at any time to any thing, and so is no more than a decoration. And importantly, everyone knows this. It's not some new hack that someone discovered that was not an intentionally designed part of the ui. For example, if that field were meant to be taken literally and seriously, then why did Twitter write it as a free-form field, and allow people to write literally anything in there, as in, animals and random objects and words, and unpronouncable strings in any language? They wrote their own ui, they could have made that a static value if they wanted. "Your argument is invalid"
  - yanderekko 4y ago
    >And importantly, everyone knows this. Do they though? I mean, I'm open to being convinced but just asserting this isn't very compelling. Why were there pre-existing rules governing the use of this field if this behavior was completely harmless? Saying "it's a free form field therefore no one should ever trust it" as a general principle seems like a stretch. Lots of web services separate display names from underlying IDs and allow flexibility in using the former, with some reasonable restrictions.