Former Facebook executive Alex Stamos said that Elon Musk’s blue check saga was a “historical self-indulgence”. Last week, Musk removed the blue check marks from some legacy accounts, only to return some of them.
The main tweet, as Musk refers to himself, removed the legacy blue check mark from accounts that had been verified on April 20 under Twitter’s old policies, which marked certain accounts blue to avoid spam accounts. could be done. Cheques, which were in the name of celebrities, public figures or journalists. Musk previously described it as a “lord and peasant system”.
The billionaire initially agreed to offer the blue check mark only to users who subscribed to Twitter Blue for $8 per month, but many celebrities and news organizations declined to pay for the service. Elon Musk later returned the verified check marks to the handful of users he claimed to have paid for, and then to more users later.
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“This is incredible self-possession of Musk from the perspective of historical timing,” Stamos said in an episode of the “Moderate Content” podcast published on Monday.
Stamos, who has been critical of Musk in the past, was previously Facebook’s chief security officer until 2018. He also previously worked at Yahoo as Chief Information Security Officer. He currently runs a cyber security firm and teaches at Stanford.
In a recent podcast, Stamos said that thanks to generative AI, society is on the verge of “a new era of bullshit” as the cost of generating content is “going to zero.”
Twitter has essentially taken a very stable verification system and turned it on its head, Stamos said, adding that in a year Musk’s social media site is “probably going to be completely unusable” because the AI is better than real humans. Is different. The bots will be difficult to differentiate — an issue Musk has previously said he wants to fix.
“Every single thing that you put any kind of anonymity or pseudo-anonymity into is going to be completely inundated by a small group of people who want to manipulate it,” Stamos said. “Recognition is a big thing.
Now identity is going to be really, really important over the next decade, and Twitter had the first and best identity program and they’ve completely destroyed it. They have made it so negative that people are begging to remove it.”
“In an age like this, it’s important to rely on platforms’ ability to prevent impersonation and verify the identities of high-profile individuals and organizations,” Stamos told Insider in a statement. “The timing of Musk destroying one of the oldest and best recognized verification programs is frankly stupid.”
Elon Musk did not respond to a request for comment prior to publication. Twitter responded to an automated email that did not answer Insider’s question.
Facebook’s former security chief joked on a podcast that Musk’s move was a “masterclass in marketing” even as celebrities took to Twitter saying they didn’t pay for Twitter Blue and don’t want to join it.
Stamos is one of many people who have called out Musk’s plan for user verification on Twitter as flawed. Earlier this week, top Tesla investor Ross Gerber told Insider’s Hassan Chowdhry that the blue-check saga could signal that Twitter is in its final stages.