This cartoonist was banned from Twitter for impersonating Elon Musk

Day 68:14Cartoonist Jeph Jacques quits Twitter by impersonating Elon Musk

It turns out jokes are OK, unless they are about you. At least, that's what Jeph Jacques found out after his impersonation of Elon Musk got him banned from Twitter. 

After his recent purchase of the social media platform, Musk, a billionaire, tweeted that comedy was now legal on Twitter.

But a series of tweets from Jacques, a cartoonist in Halifax, proved that declaration had its limits. Jacques changes his profile picture to a less than flattering photo of Musk, switched his name to copy that of the billionaire, and since his account was already verified, it looked like a legitimate profile.

Jacques started poking fun at Musk, and that's when he found out that comedy might be legal, but parody accounts come with a harsh sentence — though one Jacques expected. The real Musk tweeted that accounts attempting to impersonate someone would receive a lifetime ban, and that's exactly what happened. 

Jacques spoke to Day 6 host Brent Bambury about his run pretending to be Twitter's new boss. Here's part of that conversation. 

Why did you decide to dress up for Halloween as Elon Musk? 

Oh, gosh. Well, it was just sort of crying out for it in the moment. I had seen a few other people doing the whole impersonate Elon thing in the past. 

And then a couple of days before I went on my little journey of impersonation, I saw that Chris Kluwe had changed his name. And there were a couple other people whose tweets crossed my dashboard impersonating Elon. 

So I thought, I am not using my account for anything anymore. And I really dislike what he's doing with this website. So why don't I get in on this? This will be a fun thing to do on a Saturday afternoon. 

Did you know that it was a kamikaze mission? Were you looking to get shut down? 

Absolutely. Twitter is very clear for verified accounts that if you impersonate other people, that is against their terms of service and you'll lose your verified checkmark. You may get temporary suspensions. 

I'm frankly surprised it took as long as it did for them to shut my account down. 

How long did it take? Because you had a very prolific run as Elon Musk. I count at least 50 tweets. 

Yeah. I had a fun maybe two hours or so, just sitting around cracking jokes. I figured they would shut me down very quickly, but I went to bed Saturday night and my account was still live, so they must have turned it off sometime in the evening. 

I woke up, found it had been temporarily suspended. And then a little bit later on it had been suspended permanently. 

Do you think that Elon Musk himself ever saw any of your tweets? 

I mean, you can never say for sure, right? But knowing what I know about him as a person and the way he seems to use the Internet, I would not be surprised at all if he saw at least some of my tweets, especially considering some of them did get a lot of traffic and sharing. 

Was there a tweet that you thought could get under Elon's skin more than another? Were there any surgically damaging tweets? 

I think, out of all of them, the sickest burn was the 'never did find out what Grimes' real name was,' just because I could see that happening. 

Then there were a couple more that are not fit for polite company that I won't repeat. But some of those, I think as well probably would have gotten to him if he ever saw them. 

So you had a verified account before your account was suspended. How important had Twitter been to you? 

Oh, gosh. I mean, I basically lived on Twitter for the last 10 years or so. I was a fairly early adopter, and it was how I communicated with all of my fans, all of the people who read my comic, all of my professional friends, many of my personal friends. It was a it was a huge part of my life for a very long time. 

And then over the last couple of years, I found myself getting very burned out on the negative aspects of it, and the negative aspects of social media in general. So eventually I realized that I was looking for an excuse to walk away from it and then when Elon bought the service, I was like, OK, yeah, it's time to step away. 

Your account is gone for good. You could set up another account and lurk or you could start over again. Does that interest you at all? 

Not particularly. I have other channels that I can use to to talk to the people that I care about. As funny as this has all been, I was talking to my wife, and she made a point that it had literally never even occurred to me. 

She was like, 'Look, I know you knew what you were getting into, but Elon literally just deleted 10 years of audience building and 80,000 followers because you made him a little mad. And that's kind of ridiculous.' I was like, 'Oh, yeah, that is kind of ridiculous, isn't it?' 

But no, I don't see myself going back. My life has been better since I got off Twitter. 

Produced by Mickie Edwards