ADHD prescriptions via TikTok, pro-life groups in Tennessee target IVF and Twitter’s blue check trolls
TWITTER TROLLS’ LIES NOW COME WITH A BLUE CHECK
Twitter has become perceptibly more troll-ridden since the Elon Musk takeover. That’s backed up by the stats, of course — over 50,000 tweets bombarding the platform with hate-filled content showed up within just a few hours of the billionaire taking control. By now, if you use the platform regularly, you will likely have noticed it yourself, with fights breaking out left, right and center and digital dumpster fires fed with more than usual regularity onto your timeline.
One furious dialogue that’s blown up this week is over the price of insulin. It all started when an account with zero followers, but an all-important blue checkmark, posing as pharma giant Eli Lilly, made a false claim. “We are excited to announce insulin is free now.” It was a particularly painful lie — for a single vial of Eli Lilly’s product (of which many diabetes patients require 3-4 a month), it costs $274 in the U.S., and prices continue to skyrocket.
It means some diabetics are forced to ration other necessities like food in order to afford their insulin. Companies like Lilly have been roundly accused of price gouging — so the fake tweet created false hope for real people in a desperate situation. That blue checkmark, formerly only available to verified accounts of public figures and organizations, but now available to anyone for $8, meant the tweet was much more likely to dupe people. “We apologize to those who have been served a misleading message from a fake Lilly account,” the company tweeted.
Climate disinformation on Twitter has also proliferated during COP27. At one point, searching for “climate” on the platform brought up suggestions for #climatescam above any other results. On Wednesday, a new kind of climate troll showed up on Twitter. With an American eagle for a profile picture and another freshly-purchased blue check, the user began tweeting climate disinformation, claiming that “the Earth has been in a global cooling trend since 2016” and that “there were fewer climate deaths in 2021 than any year in recorded history. Most lame existential crisis ever.” Of course, these tweets would be of very little consequence prior to Musk’s takeover — but that all-important blue checkmark lent them a sheen of respectability.