Twitter Blue(s) for Big Beverage
Oi, Groimes! Check out me tiquileh glasses!
By now you’ve likely heard about the disaster of large adult billionaire/new Twitter owner Elon Musk’s insistent rollout/expansion of Twitter Blue, a premium service from the social media platform that costs $8/month to use. One of the “benefits” it confers is a blue check next to your username that, until very recently, indicated that the account holder was who they claimed to be. For example: I’m verified because I’m a journalist and it would be bad if someone out there pretending to be me tweeted, oh I dunno, “SCOOP: 1 in 5 cans of Coors Light contains deadly amounts of fentanyl.” That isn’t true, and it might freak people out if they believed it was coming from somebody who covers the beer industry and theoretically could be in a position to learn such a thing. (Said thing, to reiterate, is fake: Coors Light doesn’t have any fentanyl in it, though it might have some Keystone Light in it.) Anyway, the point of verification is obvious—or it was to everyone besides Elon Musk, who promptly bulldozed it like a Tesla through a crosswalk.
Last week for the first time, users were given the ability to purchase blue checks for a mere $8. Some people took the entirely predictable and utterly hilarious step of impersonating brands to tweet decidedly un-brand-safe things. Some of those faked companies were beverage firms: Nestle, PepsiCo Coca-Cola, etc. Beyond the embarrassing tweets themselves,
's Andrea Hernández pointed out that the falsely verified brands' blue checks made them virtually indistinguishable from their legitimate counterparts in Twitter's "mentions" view. Not great! For example:
This was far too funny to last, and Twitter’s 13 remaining employees eventually paused the Twitter Blue program last week to stanch the bleeding while Musk the Brain Genius contemplated new ways to embarrass himself in front of the entire world. Personally, I can’t wait to see what he comes up with! But how much longer are Big Beverage/CPG firms like Coke, Pepsi, Anheuser-Busch InBev, Unilever, and Mondelez International—all of which are among Twitter’s top 20 advertisers, according to a report from digital spending tracker Pathmatics and progressive watchdog group Media Matters—going to stick around to find out?
I’m not calling for a boycott or anything. I know these multinational firms don’t actually give a shit about Twitter, or Elon’s lazy edgelord politics. But they do give a shit about the keeping skeletons from their (sometimes recent!) pasts trapped in the closet, out of view of John Q. Consumer. They spend hundreds of millions of dollars every year to avoid being embarrassed online, and for a brief but glorious moment last week, any dipshit with a spare tenner could pierce that manicured corporate veil thanks to Elon Musk. I don’t have any answers here! But if I were, say, the chief marketing officer of Coca-Cola, I would be demanding them from the world’s richest shitposter right about now.
One last thing: it was always cosmically unjust for Pabst to fire the dude behind this past January’s anilingus tweet, but now it just seems prudish to the point of absurd. Twitter is a brand-unsafe hellscape, none of this matters! Give the ass-eating tweeter his job back!
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🥃 Oi, Groimes! Check out me tiquileh glasses!
One more thing, while we’re on the subject of parody impersonations and Our Big Beautiful Musk™️. Fingers has obtained a leaked draft of the promotional email that Elon Musk plans to send all Tesla owners, as well as every current and former Twitter user, to promote Tesla Tequila’s new glassware. The boozeletter’s editorial board and publisher understand the sensitivity of this very-real, definitely legitimate document, but believe it is in the American drinking public’s best interest to publish in full. We have done so below:
FROM: Elon Musk
TO: Credulous rubes
CC: Grimes
SUBJ: New Tesla Tequila glasses