US Senator Ed Markey chastised Elon Musk when a reporter created a verified account in his name, despite the new CEO’s rigorous anti-impersonation procedures. The 76-year-old Massachusetts Senator moved to Twitter on November 12, 2022, to release a long message addressed to Musk. In the letter, he described how a Washington Post writer constructed a false verified account mimicking the Senator. He also inquired as to “how this occurred and how to avoid it from occurring again.”
Musk addressed the matter in his response to the tweet, saying:
“Perhaps because your actual account sounds like a parody?”
Twitter’s new CEO also poked fun at the Senator’s profile photo on the microblogging site.
A @washingtonpost reporter was able to create a verified account impersonating me—I’m asking for answers from @elonmusk who is putting profits over people and his debt over stopping disinformation. Twitter must explain how this happened and how to prevent it from happening again. pic.twitter.com/R4r7p6mduP
— Ed Markey (@SenMarkey) November 11, 2022
Senator Ed Markey has been reappointed 19 times and has written a book.
Senator Ed Markey was born on July 11, 1946, and has been a member of the Democratic Party since the early 1970s. The Malden, Massachusetts, native was nurtured in a Roman Catholic home and earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Boston College in 1968. In 1972, he received his law degree from Boston Law College. A year later, in 1973, Ed Markey was elected to the Massachusetts House of Representatives, where he progressively progressed through the ranks and built a name for himself in the state’s Democratic Party.
In 1976, he defeated his Republican opponent in a special election for a seat in the United States House of Representatives. He was reappointed 19 times after that. Ed wrote a book called Nuclear Peril: The Politics of Proliferation while in the House. He was also the author of the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009. After John Kerry’s resignation, Markey was chosen as the United States Secretary of State in June 2013. In 2014, Ed was re-elected. In 1988, the Senator married Susan Blumenthal. When Musk mocked Markey’s social media profile and display photo, the latter chastised Musk for “picking conflicts online.” Ed Markey’s response has 167,700 likes and over 22,000 retweets as of this writing.
What action did the Washington Post reporter take?
A Washington Post writer set up a bogus Twitter account named “@readEdMarkey,” according to Markey’s long letter. According to the former, the reporter constructed the profile using “a spare iPhone, a credit card, and a little imagination.” The false profile even obtained the blue tick mark beneath Markey’s name after paying a little amount of money, despite the fact that he already had two accounts.
Markey also wrote in the letter:
“It seems that anybody may pay $8.00 and impersonate someone on your platform owing to Twitter’s inadequate verification standards and evident desire for revenue.” Selling the truth is risky and completely unacceptable.”
The letter came only days after the newly appointed Twitter CEO implemented an $8 monthly membership fee to get accounts verified. Elon Musk has yet to reply to Ed Markey’s statements about Twitter’s privacy as of this writing.
