Elon Musk’s leadership is ‘eroding’ Twitter’s trust with users: Reporter

The Washington Post Technology Columnist Geoffrey Fowler joins Yahoo Finance Live to discuss how he was able to impersonate a U.S. senator on Twitter after Elon Musk updated the verification process for blue checks and how Musk’s leadership at the social media platform has impacted users' trust in Twitter.

Video Transcript

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SEANA SMITH: All right, Twitter facing more chaos in the new year. Bloomberg reporting at least a dozen more staff cuts at Twitter on the global content moderation side of the business. And workers already laid off from the company are reportedly not getting the severance that they were promised, employees detailing to "Forbes" and "Wired" the lack of communication from Twitter about their severance deals.

To add to the mayhem, our next guest is saying that Twitter's new verification system to get that blue check mark doesn't work. Geoff Fowler, "Washington Post," a technology columnist, joining us back here. Geoff, it's great to see you again. So this new updated verification system certainly has been, or seemed to have been, a priority for Musk, issues with it. This is the second time that you were able to impersonate Senator Markey. Walk us through how you were able to do it and the biggest issues with this problem.

GEOFFREY FOWLER: Yeah. Oops, I did it again, I guess you might say. What I did was I wanted to test the claim by Elon Musk that his new Twitter Blue verification system would be, to use his words from a tweet, "manually authenticated" before they would give out a check mark to an account. So they said really, they were going to build trust back into Twitter with this.

So I said, OK, let's check that. So once he launched this in December, I went about trying to make a fake account for Senator Edward Markey from Massachusetts and get a check mark for it. Now, I got permission from Senator Markey to try to impersonate him.

And indeed, Twitter had put some new barriers up in place. They made me wait a little bit longer. But at the end of the day, I was still able to do it. I was still able to get the account Senator Ed Markey verified. At no point did Twitter ask me to show them an ID or to show them an email or really do anything to prove my identity other than hand them $8 for the check mark.