Elon Musk led Twitter Staff Shift Focus From Polls to a Problem of Its Own Making
Twitter Inc.'s trust and safety team, which earlier this week had been focused on the US midterm election, quickly shifted its attention to deal with a problem of its own making: a host of users impersonating major brands and celebrities, according to people familiar with the matter.
New leader Elon Musk, who purchased the company two weeks ago for $44 billion, updated the premium version of the product in a way that awards paying subscribers with blue check marks -- the same ones that governments, celebrities and businesses get on the site for free to confirm their identities. Once the option was available, users started creating accounts pretending to be major brands and politicians, fooling users and potentially jeopardizing Twitter's now-shaky reputation with top advertisers.
An account impersonating Nintendo Co., for example, tweeted an image of the Super Mario character holding up a middle finger. One posing as the pharmaceutical brand Eli Lilly & Co. tweeted that insulin was now free. “We apologize to those who have been served a misleading message from a fake Lilly account,” the official account tweeted.
Twitter's trust and safety team changed focus to Twitter Blue from the US midterms after Musk said that they should prioritize it, said the person, who declined to be named discussing non-public matters.
“Over the next few days, the absolute top priority is finding and suspending any verified bots/trolls/spam,” Musk wrote in an email to staff Wednesday night viewed by Bloomberg.
Twitter's trust and safety team spent Thursday morning focusing on the most high-profile of the instances, but after a spate of layoffs could only deal with impersonators of the highest profile accounts, the person said. The team had no
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