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via Marvel Studios
The ongoing drama surrounding Twitter’s verification process has become nothing short of a debacle in no time at all, and one intrepid social media user has shown just how easy it is to peddle misinformation to the masses by impersonating Tobey Maguire online and posting a tweet claiming that Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 4 was confirmed for release on May 3, 2024.
All it took was for writer and podcast host Cade Onder to change his name on the app to “Tobey Maguire”, post a mocked-up image of the signature Raimi logo, and within hours the news had spread like wildfire across the online world, racking up almost tens of thousands of retweets and over 100,000 likes.
Onder made sure to thank Elon Musk for letting him impersonate a well-known celebrity without the need for verification, which instantly snowballed into both Maguire and Spider-Man 4 becoming two of the hottest trending topics on the entire site, even though it was bullsh*t from the beginning.
As well as handily reinforcing the long-held notion that Marvel fans would be more than on board with the idea of Raimi and Maguire reuniting for the fourth installment that first fell apart at Sony over a decade and a half ago, Onder’s experiment additionally underlined that all it takes is for a couple of major outfits to latch onto a completely fabricated story in order for it to not just explode in popularity and awareness, but be taken as Twitter gospel.
As funny as it was to witness the online sphere fall hook, line, and sinker for something as simple as a name change and a vague tweet, it’s a little terrifying to contemplate the dangerous misinformation now easily capable of being disseminated to hundreds of millions of users without any sort of oversight. However, at least we know the people still want Spider-Man 4.