5 ms·
There isn't anything unique about your account on most social media platforms. This isn't a "plant your flag" situation like when trying to prevent identity th
by atrettel 2y ago
There isn't anything unique about your account on most social media platforms. This isn't a "plant your flag" situation like when trying to prevent identity theft. You don't need to register your account before a bad actor does. Sure, I created an online account with the IRS, credit bureaus, etc. before somebody else could. That's important because they are tied to unique identifiers like your SSN, etc. But somebody could just create a social media account impersonating you even if you already have an account on that social network. There isn't anything enforcing the uniqueness.
- chenmike 2y agoI’m pretty sure GP is saying if you already had an account and you delete it, it’s trivially easy for someone to register with your old handle and impersonate you Of course people can always impersonate you but the goal here is to prevent them from impersonating you with a social handle people knew you had.
- jjulius 2y agoIf I recall correctly, the handle you deleted stays inactive and is unavailable to new registrants. This is present on Google at least, I assume it's the same elsewhere.
- esskay 2y agoNot the case on Twitter. It becomes instantly available to anyone who wants it.
- benatkin 2y agoThe concept of a handle goes beyond a username. If someone can construct a profile that looks like someone's profile on another site and contains approximately the words in the username, like _username or imusername instead of username, they might be able to impersonate it. In that case it would be good to have an active profile on that platform to counteract it.
- atrettel 2y agoThat's an interesting point that I had not considered. In that case, your handle itself is the unique identifier. That said, if I recall correctly some sites do not recycle handles, but this is still an interesting point nonetheless.
- matthewdgreen 2y agoMy Twitter account has 140K+ followers and impersonators keep making copies that they use for cryptocurrency scams. So that's why I'm personally a little sensitive to deleting it, even if I've mostly committed to leaving that hellhole.
- angoragoats 2y agoWhat does keeping the account actually do to prevent scamming? They’re going to scam regardless.
- johnnyanmac 2y agoThat's pretty much the only upside to that blue checkmark these days. Making anyone able to buy one was a huge mistake, but they will at least do the minium check to see if someone else with that name already has a checkmark.
- angoragoats 2y agoWill they? I'd actually be surprised if there are many people that, upon receiving a suspicious message from someone who claims to be Joe Schmoe, will actually go and check to see if a different account from Joe Schmoe with a blue check. I think it's much more likely that they're either going to recognize it as a scam right away, or they won't and they'll fall for it. In either of those cases, it doesn't help for the blue-checkmark-holder to keep their account.
- johnnyanmac 2y agoThere will always be someone falling for scams. No amount of safeguards will protect them if they do zero due diligence and the scammer is persistent enough. The checkmark isn't an end-all-be-all, but it's another small step someone can use to verify without too much hassle. also, I just noticed "they" is ambiguous here. I meant "the twitter staff giving checkmarks". At least I hope they do some basic check before handing out a checkmark to an obvious impersonator.