An interesting development in the saga of the Elon Musk era at Twitter showed up this weekend involving one of Musk’s new “policies” that he fired off in a series of tweets. I realize that the Democrats may be trying to blame Elon Musk for everything, but in this instance he might be open to some legitimate criticism. He popped up with a few announcements stating that anyone changing their display names (as opposed to their account names that begin with the @ sign) to “impersonate” someone else without specifically labeling the content as a “parody” would have their accounts suspended. Given the number of satire and parody accounts floating around out there, this policy looked problematic right from the start. But his follow-up tweets made the decision seem even worse. (Associated Press)

Elon Musk tweeted Sunday that Twitter will permanently suspend any account on the social media platform that impersonates another.

The platform’s new owner issued the warning after some celebrities changed their Twitter display names — not their account names — and tweeted as ‘Elon Musk’ in reaction to the billionaire’s decision to offer verified accounts to all comers for $8 month as he simultaneously laid off a big chunk of the workforce.

“Going forward, any Twitter handles engaging in impersonation without clearly specifying “parody” will be permanently suspended,” Musk wrote. While Twitter previously issued warnings before suspensions, now that it is rolling out “widespread verification, there will be no warning.”

I’ll agree that intentionally impersonating someone else’s account with the intent to deceive other users is a problem. But Musk complicated matters further when he doubled down and said that “any name change at all” would lead to the loss of a blue checkmark if the user had one. The timing of this announcement caught my attention because our Managing Editor, Ed Morrisey, had just changed his Twitter handle recently to “Ed Didn’t Pay 8 Bucks for a Blue Check Morrissey.” (Or something close to that.) In the midst of a discussion of this with another Twitter pal, Ed Chimed in and said he had changed his name back to be on the safe side.

This seems rather silly for a few reasons. First of all, the vast majority of people making changes to their handles are doing so either to promote something or to just have a little fun with the platform. Particularly in the case of verified accounts, it’s hard to really impersonate anyone because the troll can’t generate their own blue check, so only the most clueless would be fooled.

But even if Musk is serious about banning “any name change at all” on the platform, why go to the trouble of threatening people’s verified status and then find people to police all of the name changes? Couldn’t you just make one change to the code and make the display name non-editable? That seems like it would have been a fairly fast and obvious solution.

But getting back to the original question, what set Elon Musk down this particular warpath to begin with? The Daily Beast implies that he’s doing this because people were impersonating him. That suspicion seems to be born out by the fact that “comedian” Kathy Griffin had her account suspended after changing her display name and icon to match Musk’s and tweeting support for Democrats in this week’s election. Others were similarly banished for using Musk’s name and likeness.

That seems rather petty, doesn’t it? Musk is among the richest people in the world and he just took over the entire social media platform. Obviously, he would be the subject of some jeers and spoofs. And kicking off users with huge followings isn’t going to do much for his advertising revenue. If his ego is that fragile, perhaps tweeting isn’t really his strong suit. Just saying…