Elon Musk's Twitter Trolling Might Actually Be Violating A Federal Law

Elon Musk decided to troll multiple celebrities and reporters this past weekend by giving them their blue verified checkmark back, but when you click on the checkmark it says that they are subscribed to Twitter Blue. According to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), falsely claiming that a person has "endorsed" or purchased a product is a violation of the law, and so Musk's trolling attempts could land him in serious legal trouble. And that's just the beginning of the possible legal problems, as Ring of Fire's Farron Cousins explains.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, thinks he is the funniest person on the planet. He just loves to go out there and troll everybody. And of course, last week, at the end of the week, they started removing all of the legacy verified blue check marks. Uh, I myself lost my blue check mark because I'm not going to pay money to have such a stupid little thing. But either way, people were making a big deal about it and realizing that only the blue check marks left were people who had paid for the check marks. A campaign began on Twitter called Block the Blue, which is where mostly people on the left would go through and just block anybody with a check mark cuz it meant that they were the ones giving Elon Musk $8 a month. Once this started, Elon Musk decided, you know what? And he even admitted that he was trolling, uh, o on Twitter.

He decided to start giving some celebrities, and even some reporters like Matt Bender, their check mark back. And Matt Bender has, uh, done a wonderful job of exposing Elon Musk over the, uh, last few months. And he was a big pusher of the block, the blue campaign. So Elon Musk, in his trolling ways, decided to give Matt Bender back his check mark. Other celebrities got their check marks back, LeBron James, Stephen King, uh, I think William Shatner as well. And Musk said that he is personally paying for these people to have these check marks. The problem is when you click on their check mark, it says that this user is verified because they subscribe to Twitter Blue, which is a direct violation of Section 43 a of the Lanam Act from the Federal Trade Commission. That particular section of the Lanam Act is about fraudulent endorsements.

Let me put it this way. I can't get on the air right now and say that George Clooney buys Ring of Fire t-shirts. George Clooney loves our Ring of Fire merchandise buys it every day. I don't know what he's doing with it, but he buys it every day. I, that would be illegal for me to say because I cannot give the public the impression that a celebrity is either endorsing or purchasing our products. But for Elon Musk to put those check marks back on those people's profiles, you click on it and says they subscribed when they didn't. It gives the impression that these high profile, powerful people are endorsing this service even though they're not. So, yes, that is a direct violation of federal law. It's pretty cut and dry. It's very simple. Now, Elon Musk can avoid this. All he has to do is

Take all of those accounts and say that this person is verified because Elon Musk is personally giving them a check mark. Like, that's it. That's how you get around that he can do that. He probably will. And then there's no legal violation on that front because there's another thing happening, and this is something that I'm kind of surprised has not been picked up in the media. Another person who received their check mark back, but does not appear as far as we know to be subscribed to Twitter Blue, a little guy called Donald Trump, got his blue check mark back that check mark while small is valued at $8 per month. And if Elon Musk did in fact give Donald Trump that check mark back without Trump subscribing to Twitter blue, y'all know what that is?