Whistleblower: 'GodMode' Access Still a Problem at Twitter

A new whistleblower is claiming that any Twitter engineer can still activate an internal program and tweet from any account, according to The Washington Post.

The program, until recently, was called "GodMode" — and it is still a problem at Twitter, three months after Elon Musk's takeover of the company, the whistleblower alleges, according to the Post.

The claim, if true, would mean Twitter continues to violate its legal obligations under Elon Musk, the newspaper said.

The allegation came in a complaint filed with the Federal Trade Commission in October by the firm Whistleblower Aid. The former Twitter employee is continuing to be interviewed by congressional lawmakers and FTC staff.

The concerns about Twitter's security had jumped after a 2020 incident when three people breached the company's internal systems and tweeted as Musk, Barack Obama, and others, the newspaper noted.

The Associated Press had called the incident "one of the most high-profile security breaches in recent years."

The hackers had sent out bogus tweets on July 15, 2020, from the accounts of Obama, Joe Biden, and a number of tech billionaires including Amazon's Jeff Bezos, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and Musk.

Twitter executives had maintained that they had repaired the problems, 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 statements to users and investors were false and/or misleading."

"Our client has a reasonable belief that the evidence in this disclosure demonstrates legal violations by Twitter," the new complaint says.

Ella Irwin, Twitter's head of trust and safety, did not respond to an email from the Post seeking comment on the new claims.