Elon Musk’s troubles with Twitter continued late last week when a verified Tesla account began posting about the electric automaker.
Under Musk’s leadership, Twitter recently altered its Blue verification check mark service, now requiring users to pay a monthly fee of $8 to create an account with a check mark. While Musk appears very proud of this idea to generate revenue, it has led to countless accounts being established which mimic the official accounts of some of the world’s largest corporations.
Read: Elon Musk Wants Carmakers To Resume Twitter Advertising
On Friday, an account by the name of @TeslaReal received a Blue check mark and began posting as if it was the carmaker. It’s posts received tens of thousands of likes in a matter of hours. One post proved particularly popular, Bloomberg reports.
“We will be offering 10 thousand vehicles to support the Ukrainian military,” it said. “Our cars are the most advanced explosive devices on the market. Everyone’s talking about Twitter going up in flames but our cars did that before it was cool.”
Notably, the account was marked as a parody but it certainly could have confused some unsuspecting users. At the time of writing, the account had been suspended for violating Twitter’s rules.
Tesla is far from the only company that a Twitter user has mimicked. An account posing as pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly & Co. recently made a tweet proclaiming that insulin was now going to be offered for free. This tweet received 10,000 likes before being removed and promoted the company’s share price to drop from $368 to $346, erasing billions from its market cap.
In an email sent to Twitter staff last Wednesday, Musk said suspending accounts like these was a priority.
“Over the next few days, the absolute top priority is finding and suspending any verified bots/trolls/spam,” he wrote.
