It took me less than 25 minutes to set up a fake anonymous Apple ID using a VPN and disposable email, attach a masked debit card to it (with the address being Twitter's HQ), and get a verified account for a prominent figure. Just think what a nation-state or bad actor could do...
Twitter wants to pass the verification steps off to Apple and card providers but Apple didn't check a single detail and you can easily find disposable cards with no links to you or even stolen/hacked card details if you're a particularly malicious actor. The policy is unworkable
Twitter claims they've raised costs for malicious actors but I think they've actually lowered them. Now anyone with $8 can buy a verified badge rather than having to hire someone to hack a verified's account or trawl through password leaks.
It's not impersonations of high-profile accounts that are the problem. It's the person impersonating a minor online celebrity, an obscure government functionary, or perhaps their ex. That's where the harm will be done and no one will notice or care until it's far too late
The problem with the argument that "the verification system now just means something different and we should accept that" is that the new system is very unintuitive and counter to what every other SM site does. If you're not terminally online you may not realise what's happened
There will be a few examples of big accounts doing big damage but I suspect the more common scenario we'll see is small to medium size accounts doing small to medium size damage (or big damage to a small number of people). It'll be death by a thousand cuts not a single blow
This is a really good point. If everyone can get verified (without anybody actually verifying their identity at any stage of the process) how will anyone - let alone twitter - know who the real Dr X is?
https://twitter.com/PatrickW/status/1590497575177945090?
Btw if you want to talk to me about this please DM me. My notifications are utterly unusable right now but I see a couple people have reached out.
Earlier this year it was revealed that 57 UK MP’s didn’t have twitter accounts. What’s to stop someone starting up an account as one of them? As long as you don’t go overboard the impersonation could take a while to be detected. (h/t @GidMK) dorsetecho.co.uk/news/20140510.…
My argument is not only that bad stuff might happen. It was also a response to twitter’s repeated claims that just because they’re not doing verification it doesn’t mean no one is. My experiment debunks this claim. No one checked my identity at any stage.
As I said earlier during the Elon Musk Twitter Space meeting with the advertisers: Twitter should focus on prevention rather than mitigation with the impersonation issue. As long as they only treat impersonation as their problem AFTER it’s happened I’m not sure they’ll get far
Anyway I’m off to bed so will probably miss most tweets I get for the next few hours. DM me if it’s important.
This is exactly the sort of somewhat lower level stuff that could become a bigger issue. Another is people impersonating sex workers, either to get details on their customers, expose the sex workers, or even just to sell their content without permission 
Maybe Twitter is better at moderation now (despite losing staff) but around the start of the Covid pandemic one of my friends had their full address posted on Twitter by trolls for days without anything being done despite multiple reports
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