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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

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.

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.