Whistleblower: Twitter still has a ‘god mode’

Twitter still has a so-called god mode, an anonymous whistleblower tells a US Senate committee. Twitter says it has stopped doing that, but an employee says that mode still exists under a different name.

That writes The Washington Post. The whistleblower spoke to members of the US Senate and stock market authority FTC this week. According to the newspaper, the whistleblower also reported the incident in October last year. The Post has managed to get its hands on that charge.

The complainant, who remains anonymous, tells the committee that Twitter still uses a god mode. In that mode it is possible to post tweets from any account. In 2020, the mode was abused by a bunch of teenagers who broke into Twitter and posted tweets to accounts of prominent figures on the site.

Twitter later said that god fashion had been removed, including to market and stock market authorities who needed to approve Elon Musk’s takeover. Now one employee says that at least in October 2022, when the takeover talks were in full swing, such a mode still existed. It would now have a different name: ‘privileged mode’. That would be used by Twitter employees to post tweets on behalf of advertisers. The employee says he came forward in response to an earlier whistleblower who sounded the alarm about the god fashion.