Elon Musk Is Cracking Down on Accounts Pretending to Be Him

It all started when Musk made the bold declaration that "comedy is now legal on Twitter." No one ever said it wasn't, but I digress.

Musk presumably made this claim because he thinks that Twitter was previously not a haven for free speech, although a quick browse through the replies of some of the site's more extremist users showed that a lot of inflammatory things went unchecked. In his acquisition of the social media giant, Musk hoped to finally make it the spam-free, bot-free playground of his dreams.

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Musk also promised to restore the accounts of anyone suspended for "minor & dubious reasons." That promise was in response to Mikhaila Peterson, known as the daughter of psychologist, author and professor Jordan Peterson. The "minor" reason why he was suspended from Twitter? Misgendering and mocking Elliot Page for his gender affirmation surgery.

Transphobia is cool in Musk's books, but there's still no word as to what he defines as "comedy." It seems as though it's definitely not pretending to be him to make some of the funniest tweets imaginable.

While much of the evidence has since been swiftly scrubbed either because the accounts got suspended or they deleted the tweets to avoid suspension, it's clear that Musk was not too happy about being made the butt of Twitter's collective joke. I don't get it. I thought comedy was legal now. Among those suspended include comedian Kathy Griffin and cartoonist Jeph Jacques.

Musk then imposed a simple guideline to avoid impersonation: specify that you are a parody account.

Musk is clearly not a man of his word. After all, he did attempt to back out of the Twitter deal the first time around. Despite following the new parody guidelines, H3H3 Productions founder Ethan Klein was suspended after jokingly impersonating Musk.

Others are reporting bugs with their app ever since they criticized Musk on the platform. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez noticed that her Twitter account is not at full functionality that's normal for a verified user ever since she spoke up about the site's new controversial CEO.

Until this gets resolved, comedy is not legal on Twitter. At least not when Elon Musk is the punchline.

Photo courtesy of Joe Schildhorn/BFA