For the most part, affected users are taking it easy. Irish YouTuber and Twitch streamer Clare Cullen still has her Halloween display name, “Scare Cullen / Clisare 🎃👻”. “I really don’t care,” she said. “I think Twitter will die soon anyway, so I don’t care.”
Then there’s the Australian newsletter writer and barrettwho had been changing his Twitter display name to a real-time countdown to the release of Avatar: The Path of Water a few months ago as part of what he described as “an ongoing personal joke with friends, colleagues and readers of my newsletter over the years, in which I’ve been talking about the launch of the Avatar the film being the best that has taken place in the history of cinema”.
His name was frozen as “Dan Barrett – 38 days until Avatar: Way of Water”. (The film opens in Australia on December 15.) “Ultimately, there’s something perfect that right in what could be the last days of Twitter, Twitter came along and gave me this ridiculously dumb username,” he said. “There is something poetic about the whole moment.”
However, hope is within reach: Barrett checked Twitter and discovered that there was a potential loophole to change the name on verified accounts. It has a lot in common with hammering away at the keyboard until the computer works again. After speaking with BuzzFeed News, Barrett tried the technique and discovered, after a couple of minutes of constant mouse clicking, that he could use brute force to go back to being old “Dan Barrett.”
Cullen fears that the small change (most verified accounts can’t revert to their non-joke names) is indicative of a larger, more troubling problem. “It’s an example of Elon Musk totally losing control of Twitter and trying crazy things to fix things that he’s screwed up,” he said.
Vaughn said she, too, is upset by the direction Musk is taking on Twitter. “The previous leadership of Twitter, and now Elon, have lost sight of the original value of the blue check mark: to verify who is and who is not a real person,” she said. “People should still be able to parody and remain anonymous on Twitter, but I’d love to know that every blue check I interacted with was a real person, and not just an account like @cryptoethdoge2048 who paid $8 to checkmark their bot “.
Dave Cobb, a theme park influencer from Los Angeles, is also not a fan of Musk. In fact, his display name is now locked as “Dave ‘Lick My Tint @elonmusk’.Cobb, of course, would like the freedom to change it back to his legal name, but he’s okay with the situation.
“I wanted to make sure my username came up with my clear opinion of Mr. Musk, which is that he can feel free to lick my corruption,” Cobb said via Twitter DM. “It’s fun to see people joke about his missteps. And if a few years from now my Twitter legacy is solely about daring him to lick my stain, I’d be more than happy with that.”
