Twitter’s verification process is notoriously a blow, but you can expect a company not to fall into the exact same fake twice, right? Wrong!
In 2012, Twitter confirmed an account with well-known author Cormac McCarthy, which he actually started unpublished author. Now, in 2021, it has done the same thing again, briefly reviewing a second McCarthy fake under the handle @CormacMcCrthy.
Account verification has now been removed, but was confirmed by a McCarthy representative on ICM Partners Limit that it was a fake. “I can confirm that this is definitely not a genuine Cormac McCarthy account,” they said. “Twitter is aware of this situation and we hope the problem is resolved soon.” Twitter has not yet responded to the request for comment Limit.
It’s certainly hard to believe that 88-year-old McCarthy is best known for many of his novels, e.g. Road, The meridian of bloodand No land for old men – would never tweet something just as twee as the following:
A tweet from the Cormac McCarthy account when it was confirmed earlier today.
But apparently Twitter headquarters was no wiser.
The @CormacMcCrthy account has rarely tweeted from 2018 but it was confirmed after a couple of its tweets spread the virus and garnered tens of thousands of likes and retweets. Many Twitter users were immediately skeptical about the authenticity of the account. “We have normalized the idea of geniuses lowering themselves on social media that people can really believe that Cormac McCarthy would tweet John Oliver’s monologue at cadence,” commented British author Ned Beauman.
But Doing Numbers ’temptation was apparently too much for some to stay away. The other confirmed author, Stephen King, had little back and forth with fake McCarthy, even if King really cheated the account is not clear.
The Twitter validation process is often criticized for being slow, unfair, or simply wrong. It relaunched the verification process earlier this year using criteria that the accounts should be ”genuine, significant and active“For review just “pause” the program after a week. Researchers have found that company inspections seem so haphazard that they are checked frequently spam and bot accounts. But still, they really should have noticed that something was here.
