A former Twitter employee has revealed that the company has access to all user accounts and can "tweet" from any account if needed. The former Twitter employee made the revelation to members of the Federal Trade Commission's Congressional Trade Commission (Federal Trade Commission/FTC). In his testimony, the former Twitter employee stated that every engineer or technician at Twitter still has access to activate an internal program called "GodMode". Through GodMode, Twitter staff can tweet from anyone's account they want. The program is reportedly still active and has been renamed "Privilege Mode".
According to the former Twitter employee's testimony, the program was actually created for advertising purposes. The purpose of the program is to allow Twitter staff to write tweets using the advertiser's account when the advertiser is unable to do so themselves. Regarding the existence of GodMode, according to the former Twitter employee who gave the testimony, GodMode can still be accessed on any Twitter engineer's laptop. GodMode can be accessed by simply changing a simple code from "FALSE" to "TRUE". When this mode is used, a warning will be given to anyone who tries to use it "THINK BEFORE YOU DO THIS." Summarized by KompasTekno from The Washington Post, Thursday (26/1/2023), the former Twitter employee who exposed the existence of GodMode said that he was brave enough to become a whistleblower after being motivated by the testimony of former Twitter security head, Peiter Zatko, in 2020.
If you still remember, in 2020, there was a hacking incident involving the accounts of big names by a teenager from the United States. At that time, a number of accounts belonging to celebrities such as Bill Gates, Barack Obama, Kanye West, and even Elon Musk, were hacked and misused for Bitcoin fraud. Twitter at that time said that they had fixed the problem and improved security and protected user privacy. However, at that time, Zatko denied Twitter's claim and said that Twitter indeed had poor access control and was even prone to violations.