(DCWatchdog.com) – A Democrat US Senator has threatened Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk with federal government intervention in his companies unless the billionaire “fixes” them.
“Fix your companies. Or Congress will,” Democrat US Senator of Massachusetts Ed Markey tweeted to Elon Musk on Sunday.
Markey’s threat was brought about by Musk’s newly introduced system of paid verification for Twitter profiles, which requires a monthly fee of $8.00.
Last week, the Democrat US Senator had sent Musk a “sternly worded letter,” according to The Washington Times.
In it, Markey complained that a reporter of The Washington Post had easily impersonated him by paying the $8 fee and getting a fake account in the senator’s name verified by Twitter, with the respective blue badge.
The Massachusetts US lawmaker declared that Twitter had turned into the “Wild West of social media” after Musk bought it for $44 billion last month.
He demanded that the world’s richest person respond to his questions within two weeks.
“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,” Markey tweeted.
However, Elon Musk got back to him much faster and did so with snark.
“Perhaps it is because your real account sounds like a parody?” he fired back on Sunday.
After the billionaire ridiculed him with the above question, Sen. Markey pointed out that federal regulators had already looked into Musk’s companies, Tesla and Twitter.
He vowed that more scrutiny by the US government would follow the US Congress would be doing Musk’s “company fixing” for him unless Twitter’s new owner bowed to his requests.
Probably regardless of Markey’s threats, Musk announced new changes to the Twitter verification process a few hours after their exchange on Sunday.
“Rolling out soon, Twitter will enable organizations to identify which other Twitter accounts are actually associated with them,” the world’s richest person wrote.
Since he bought the microblogging platform, Musk has struggled with how to weed out bots from real users and differentiate parody accounts from official ones.
After introducing the paid subscription fee, the company failed to keep up with the high demand for verifications.
Musk’s latest announcement led a user to ask whether “users will define organizations or if Twitter will pick and choose.”
The social media platform’s new owner declared that Twitter should be “the final arbiter” and that he was “open to alternatives.”
Sen. Ed Markey warns Elon Musk: ‘Fix your companies. Or Congress will’https://t.co/gbqMoTddgc pic.twitter.com/QqDLPBk2wM
— The Washington Times (@WashTimes) November 14, 2022
