Twitter Staffers Impersonating Laid-off Data Engineers Misled Media Sources

October 29, 2022 By Fakun Gram

(Image Credit Google)

Two people were spotted outside the Twitter offices in San Francisco, California, purporting to be Data Engineers who had been fired by the firm. Several media sources promptly reported the incident without realizing that the two people were actors. According to reports, two guys carrying boxes were spotted outside Twitter's headquarters in San Francisco, California, on Friday morning. Additionally, they claimed to be Data Engineers who had been fired by the company's new owner, Elon Musk. They were the first to be interviewed among the other employees and executives who were supposedly also laid off as a result of the new ownership, according to multiple media sites like CNBC, Daily Mail, and NBC, therefore they were the ones to break the news right away.

It’s happening
Entire team of data engineers let go. These are two of them#TwitterTakeover pic.twitter.com/gNSl6qSCKU — Deirdre Bosa (@dee_bosa) October 28, 2022

Aside from the three media outlets, images and videos of the two pranksters were shared on the network. The names of the two people the press interviewed are Daniel Johnson and Rahul Ligma, which is a reference to an online joke. Reports further verified that these names don't exist in Twitter's Slack email system and that there is no proof of these two people's existence on LinkedIn. Apart from the name of the meme, the two said many things to the media that were absurd and led them to doubt the general population. If Elon Musk owned Twitter, "Rahul Ligma" asserted, "Michelle Obama wouldn't have happened." He was carrying a book by Michelle Obama.

Quite ironic that a major news outlet failed to do basic diligence and fell for a crisis actor prank, resulting in the spread of misinfo, on the first day of new ownership. All you had to do was ask to see a badge or look for bird-themed stuff in the boxes. Also we don’t use Zoom https://t.co/QtIrBjOH3H
— Paul Lee (@BeeBimBop) October 28, 2022

CNBC's Deirdre Bosa tweeted the conversation she had with the fictitious employees. She added that two of them appeared noticeably shaken, and one of them claimed to own a Tesla but was unsure of how he would pay for it. One of these bogus employees was fired at a meeting on Zoom, according to Suzzane Phan of ABC7 Bay Area in a since-deleted tweet, and he will now just be spending time with his family in the interim. Paul Lee, the product manager for Twitter, criticized several media organizations, particularly CNBC, for publishing unconfirmed material, according to the New York Post. He said that just verifying a credential or an appearance before reporting it to the public

By Fakun Gram

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Twitter Staffers Impersonating Laid-off Data Engineers Misled Media Sources

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