The devolving social media platform formerly known as Twitter has become a cesspool of disinformation and right-wing fury.
Its famous blue check mark, which once verified the identity of users and became a symbol of reliability, can now be bought for $8 a month, allowing anyone to create imposter accounts.
After billionaire Elon Musk purchased the platform and dismantled the verification system earlier this year, a spate of grifters with blue check marks have masqueraded as businesses, journalists, celebrities, and politicians.
My latest encounter with one of these imposters on Twitter, which Musk renamed X, came late Thursday afternoon, when a man claiming to be a “disinformation specialist & fact checker” for The Detroit News took issue with my story about 910AM Superstation changing its format to conservative talk radio including shows like The Glenn Beck Program and The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show. The user behind the “verified” account, @barryhoova, asked if I had confirmed my assertion that the radio station “will air right-wing outrage.”
“It seems like this ‘Journalist’ has an agenda against media that doesn’t exactly fit their own narrative, which is shitty journalism,” he wrote.
The more he pecked away at his keyboard – butchering grammar and criticizing anyone who disagreed with him – the more suspicious I became that he was not, in fact, a Detroit News fact-checker.
When I responded that it was odd for a professional fact-checker to misspell “rallies,” he blamed his bowel movement.
“LOL damn Steve you finally caught me slipping w a grammatical error while taking my morning dump,” he wrote. “Shame on me!! Lololol. But I’m actually shocked you knew me since you’re a shit journalist who pumps your own narrative as fact.”
Curious if The Detroit News had hired a bombastic, grammatically challenged fact-checker, I emailed the top editor, Gary Miles, whose integrity I’ve always admired, to ask.
“I’ve never heard of him; nor am I aware that he’s ever had any association with The News,” Miles responded. “We don’t have and I also can’t imagine we’d ever create a ‘disinformation specialist’ – we rather focus on legit info!”
So there you have it: a “verified” account on the social media platform masquerading as a “disinformation specialist & fact checker” is spreading misinformation.
It’s difficult to know how many people were fooled by this imposter. Several well-respected journalists follow his account.
There were clues that he was not a real fact-checker. On his bio, for example, he claims he works for @DetNews, the newspaper’s former account that was discarded in 2012. And one of his profile photos shows gold teeth etched with the words, “I need $.”
I reached out to the fake fact-checker to ask why he’s pretending to be working with the newspaper, and he responded, 'you mean like you call yourself a reporter?" He then added to his bio that he was a fact-checker for Metro Times.
While this lone imposter account may seem inconsequential, it’s an unfortunate example of what Twitter — or rather, X — has become: a swamp of misinformation and duplicity.
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