Twitter engineers can still use 'God Mode' to tweet from any account, says former employee

A whistleblower has claimed that Twitter engineers can still use the app's "GodMode" which allows them to tweet from any account.

More than a thousand Twitter employees had access to this feature in 2020. The company's management had claimed that they had fixed the issue, but this new complainant says otherwise.

The whistle-blower, who is a former employee of the company, has claimed that the programme has been renamed to "privileged mode" and is still on the company laptops of all engineers.

He says that the company merely revoked the default access to the tool after 2020, but engineers can still access it by simply changing one line of the code.

And the only thing stopping them from doing so is a warning that pops up on the screen stating, "THINK BEFORE YOU DO THIS." He also said that the app cannot keep track of who uses any of the special privileges.

According to a report in The Washington Post, the person has spoken with Congress and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), and if the charges are proven to be true, the company could face a $1 billion fine.

This is not the first time that Twitter has come under fire for a lapse in its security system. In 2020, teenage crypto hackers had managed to gain access to the Twitter accounts of people like Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Uber, and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates.

They put out several fake tweets from these accounts before the social media company managed to fix the issue.

In December last year, UK journalist and TV personality Piers Morgan's Twitter account was hacked, and the hackers managed to put out a number of offensive tweets from his account before anyone could understand what was happening.

One of the tweets said, "f**k the Queen." Another claimed that the controversial influencer Andrew Tate had been "shot dead in Dubai." Tate had to take to Twitter to clarify that he was still alive. "Hard to kill," he wrote in the tweet.

One of the tweets asked former Prime Minister Boris Johnson to get a haircut because he was an "ugly bum."