Twitter’s launch of verified NFT profiles has further heated up the dispute between proponents and critics of digital art.
Plugin developer calls NFTs an “investment scam”
In the last week, Twitter released a new feature that lets NFT owners automatically verify their ownership of the digital art piece when they use the NFT as their profile picture. While many NFT aficionados embraced the feature, highlighting that it truly shows the power of digital authenticity certificates, skeptics did not take Twitter’s move lightly.
One open-source developer, who goes by the name mcclure, even released a browser plugin that automatically blocks all Twitter users who use verified NFT profile pictures on her Github account, calling digital art NFTs an “investment scam”. Besides pointing out the environmental impact of NFTs and the various scams and art theft schemes present within the NFT market, the readme file accompanying the plugin states:
In short, NFT users are just irritating to be around. People who bought NFTs have to keep hyping other people to buy NFTs or the NFTs they bought will lose value. Twitter NFT cliques are rife with sockpuppet accounts, dogpiling and indifferentiable monkey clones. Blocking NFT users just makes Twitter nicer.
Musk is not amused either
Tesla CEO Elon Musk also commented on the new Twitter feature, in his usual concise manner. He argues that Twitter would be better off spending its money on combating the myriad of spambots that flood the platform with fake giveaway scams.
Twitter is spending engineering resources on this bs while crypto scammers are throwing a spambot block party in every thread!?
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 21, 2022
To make matters even worse, the new feature doesn’t even seem to be working as intended. According to a Mashable article, Twitter does not check whether an NFT collection is verified. Hence, it is still possible to right-click an NFT, use the image file to mint a fake NFT, and get one of the coveted hexagon profile pictures on Twitter for free.
