Credit: @7virtues_An unofficial Disney Twitter account found itself mysteriously verified early this morning – then proceeded to go on a tweeting rampage.
Twitter’s verification process is an ongoing saga. Since Elon Musk took over the social media platform in October 2022, he’s introduced paid verification (AKA Twitter Blue), canceled it, reintroduced it again, introduced legacy verified checkmarks, removed all the legacy verified checkmarks, started charging official business $1,000 a month for a gold tick, then randomly started verifying high profile users with at least a million followers anyway.
Confused? Same. But nobody was more confused than the owner of @DisneyJuniorUK – a long-running parody account that, despite not actually being affiliated with the Walt Disney Company, found itself verified with a gold tick in the early morning of April 24.
Upon discovering their verified status, the account holder (who also tweets from the account @7virtues_ ) tweeted “no f***ing way.” It then pinned a tweet containing racial slurs to the top of its profile.
Other tweets included promises to add adult animations South Park and Family Guy to Disney Junior UK (a TV channel that hasn’t existed since October 2020).
According to Variety, a source confirmed that Disney became aware of the fake account in the early hours of the morning in the U.K. and had reached out to Twitter to resolve the issue. Within a few hours, @DisneyJuniorUK was suspended.
The account holder’s second account, however, remains active and has since shared messages such as “FUCK YOU ELON MUSK FUCK YOU YOU FINNA FACE MY FURY” and “I’m not even kidding when I say that Disney might actually fuck my whole life up.”
The account also contains a header image memorializing the @DisneyJuniorUK account, which was originally launched as a parody page in June 2021.
Upon his arrival at Twitter, Musk vowed to dismantle the app’s “corrupt and nonsensical” verification system. What’s followed is months of confusion, from a Twitter Blue account impersonating the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly and Company, causing its stocks to plummet by tweeting “insulin is free now,” to the latest Disney Junior incident.
Sure, Musk has defeated one “nonsensical” system. But he’s replaced it with one far more confusing – and with much greater potential for chaos – than any idealistic, pre-October 2022 Twitter user could have conceived.