A new Twitter whistleblower has emerged, supporting last year’s surprising testimony about the dismal state of the company’s privacy protections and saying the company continues to violate its legal obligations under new owner Elon Musk.
The former employee has told members of Congress and staff at the Federal Trade Commission that any Twitter engineer can activate an internal program until recently called “GodMode” and tweet from any account today, three months after Musk’s takeover.
The allegation was also made in a complaint filed in October by the nonprofit law firm Whistleblower Aid with the FTC, which is continuing to interview former employees. A congressional staffer shared the complaint with The Washington Post.
The company’s current head of trust and safety, Ella Irwin, did not respond to an email seeking comment on the new claims. Parag Agrawal, the chief executive for a year before Musk fired him in October, did not respond to a Twitter message seeking comment.
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Concerns about Twitter’s security soared after an incident in 2020 when teenagers breached Twitter’s internal systems and tweeted as Musk, Barack Obama and others. Twitter executives in 2020 said they had repaired the glitches, but the whistleblower disputes that.
“After the 2020 hack in which teenagers were able to tweet as any account, Twitter publicly stated that the problems were fixed,” the complaint says. “However, the existence of GodMode is one more example that Twitter’s public...
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