The chaos of blue diamonds continues to rage on Twitter, the social network now owned by Elon Musk. The choice to allow the purchase of blue checks – the symbol once awarded to verified accounts by Twitter – has led to more than a few major incidents.

In some cases, the ability to buy the blue check has been used to troll users and Elon Musk himself, but the feature has also been used to deal potentially fatal blows to some publicly traded companies: a fake account has been posing as the pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly and one tweet (“Now insulin is free for everyone”) was enough for the company to lose hundreds of millions on the stock market; very similar fate for Lockheed Martin, penalized in turn by another troll account.

In short, we’ve already passed the boundaries of jokes that are destined to be born and die on the Internet. Twitter’s inability to dissuade anyone steal the identities of companies, politicians and entrepreneurs it is already causing significant damage to the economy. It is therefore not surprising that US policy is already beginning to take an interest in the issue.

Democratic Senator Friday Ed Markey has published an open letter addressed to Elon Musk, sharply criticizing the choice to post the blue checks against payment and asking the entrepreneur some common sense questions. Markey cited a recent article by a Washington Post reporter who had firsthand tested the vulnerabilities of the new authentication system, explaining how easy it was to steal someone’s identity without major obstacles (“just a phone and a credit card balance”, he said). To prove his point, the WaPo reporter had chosen to reveal the identity of the Senator Marky — who apparently took it personally.

“Twitter needs to explain to us how something like this could happen and what it plans to do to prevent something like this from happening again,” the senator wrote. In short, politics does its job: questions are asked in the event of a problem, in the hope that companies will answer with common sense and that it is not necessary to intervene with new rules.

But Elon Musk and common sense apparently don’t go in the same sentence. The entrepreneur chose to respond in his own way: “Maybe it happened because your real account looks like a parody account,” the entrepreneur tweeted, amassing hundreds of thousands of likes. “Oh, and why are you wearing a mask in your profile picture?” he added, citing the profile picture used by the senator.

Needless to say, Ed Markey didn’t appreciate the billionaire’s irreverence. “One of your companies has already had to sign an agreement with the FTC. NHTSA is investigating another of your companies involved in a number of fatal accidents. And you choose to spend your time sorting out fights on the internet?” he wrote in response to Musk. “Solve your company’s problems or Congress will.”

Perhaps Musk would do well to take Markey’s menacing tone very seriously. The senator sits on virtually every committee charged with, among other things, determining the future of its companies. Markey even sits on the Senate committees on commerce, science and transportation. Not enough, he’s also on the space subcommittee. SpaceX and Tesla may well have earned a dangerous new foe.



Source: Lega Nerd

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