Twitter continues to accumulate controversies. If already last year several voices commented on the great lack of protections in the social network to ensure the privacy of its users, a new accusation claims that the company would not have put any kind of solution even with Elon Musk in charge.
In a hearing before the United States Congress, where members of the Federal Trade Commission were also present, a former employee of the social network declared that Twitter still has an internal tool, known as “GodMode”, which would allow tweeting from any account.
A program that already brought headaches
The Washington Post has echoed this accusation thanks to an employee of the US Congress, who shared with the media a complaint filed last October by Whistleblower, a non-profit law firm that is responsible for representing former employees from Twitter and other big companies.
GodMode was precisely the internal program that in 2020 starred in one of the most controversial moments in the history of the platform. On July 15 of that year, several highly relevant accounts with a large number of followers, including Barack Obama and Elon Musk himself, spread a cryptocurrency scam against their will after a hack that allowed criminals use said tool for internal use.
After this incident, the managers of Twitter announced the repair of said failure in the system, something that the current complainant questions: “After the 2020 hack in which several teens were able to tweet as any account, Twitter publicly stated that the issues had been fixed”affirms his complaint. “However, the existence of GodMode is yet another example that Twitter’s public statements to users and investors were false and/or misleading“.
The anonymous whistleblower, who also spoke with TWP, states that the social network’s engineers only changed the name of the program after the incident, renamed “privileged mode”. A tool that would serve, according to his words, so that Twitter could tweet on behalf of advertisers in the event that they could not on their own.
