AOC Rips Into Elon Musk's Removal Of Twitter Blue Ticks: 'Setting The Stage For Major Potential Harm' During Disasters

Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (AOC) slammed billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk for the removal of Twitter‘s legacy blue ticks on Thursday. 

What Happened: The American lawmaker and activist took to Twitter to complain after the social media giant started taking down legacy checkmarks.

"Jokes aside, this is setting the stage for major potential harm when a natural disaster hits and no one knows what agencies, reporters, or outlets are real," AOC said.

See Also: Elon Musk’s Twitter 2.0 To Label Tweets Violating Hate Speech Policy

"Not long ago we had major flash floods. We had to mobilize trusted info fast to save lives. Today just made that harder," she added. 

AOC, who is a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, holds a grey checkmark reserved for "government or multilateral organization account."

Why It Matters: AOC quoted another tweet from a user that contained tweets from two accounts claiming to represent the official New York government. As neither account had an authenticity checkmark, it was difficult to discern which account was genuine.

Later, a manual check by Benzinga revealed that the authentic New York government account was issued a grey checkmark following the incident, while the fake account was suspended.

The Musk-led microblogging platform on Thursday began implementing its new policy to remove the legacy verified badges. Under the new policy, the company said only individuals and organizations with subscriptions would be given a verified badge. 

Musk, who took over Twitter late last year, has brought it under a newly registered entity called X Corp. as he seeks to turn the microblogging platform into an “everything app.”

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