Michael Cera is the latest famous Canadian to be the target of fake X (Twitter) ads.
Over the past several days, the Brampton, Ontario-born actor was trending on Twitter. While this mainly stemmed from people lamenting Cera’s absence from fellow Canadian and Barbie co-star Ryan Gosling’s buzzworthy “I’m Just Ken” Oscars performance, there were a bunch of other posts about his appearance in ad scams.
Nearly all ads I'm getting are some kind of Qanon MICHAEL CERA EXECUTED AT GITMO fantasy pic.twitter.com/Xy3dJZDDPo
— Short story debunker (@seriations) March 7, 2024
The “ads” in question largely consist of newscast-style graphics referring to a “sensational scandal in Canada” and Michael Cera’s head awkwardly edited onto the body of a man (in one case, controversial internet provocateur Andrew Tate) who’s being taken away by police.
“What happened to him when the cameras turned off?” reads a dramatic caption, trying to pull people into clicking. However, the links included in these ads ultimately just lead to cryptocurrency sites.
The Michael Cera situation brings to mind what happened with Canadian chef and TV host Mary Berg earlier this year. On X, many users shared ads that closely resemble the ones with Cera to suggest that Berg had committed some sort of crime as a way to get people to click. The official X account for The Good Stuff with Mary Berg, Berg’s ongoing morning show, even had to issue a statement addressing the slew of fake posts.
To be sure, social media platforms have always struggled with fake news and other misleading posts, and Twitter has been no different. However, it’s particularly egregious when these come in the form of paid ads. Yes, all of these posts are showing up to people because someone had paid Twitter to promote them.
It speaks to how little moderation there is on the platform following Elon Musk’s takeover. Under the guise of “free speech,” the clownish executive has loosened X’s restrictions on blocking accounts that were sharing hateful posts. This led many of X’s biggest advertisers to withdraw from the platform, labelling it a “high-risk” venture due to the overall lack of content moderation.
This also just allows bad actors to share blatantly false stories that, in the case of Berg and Cera, are actually defaming public figures. Naturally, this all goes against the so-called “free speech” that Musk claims to care so much about. (Of course, anyone outside of Musk’s sycophantic fanbase would note that the ever-hypocritical edgelord believes free speech shouldn’t extend to people who criticize him.)
We’d reach out to X for comment on the rise of fake ads targeting famous Canadians, but Musk has oh-so-maturely set the company’s press auto-reply to the poop emoji.
Image credit: Fake X ad
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