Facebook's former security chief calls Elon Musk's blue check marks saga a 'historical self-own'

• Ex-Facebook exec Alex Stamos said Elon Musk's blue check saga was a "historical self-own."
• Last week, Musk took away blue check marks from some legacy accounts, only to return some of them.
• Stamos said Musk's system will make it difficult to identify bots and could make Twitter "unusable."

Facebook's former security chief, Alex Stamos, said Elon Musk's blue check mark saga last week was a "historical self-own."

The Chief Twit, as Musk refers to himself, removed legacy blue check marks from accounts on April 20 that had been verified under Twitter's old policies, which gave some accounts blue checks to avoid spam accounts pretending to be celebrities, public figures, or journalists. Musk previously described it as a "lords & peasants system."

The billionaire initially agreed to give blue check marks solely to users who subscribed to Twitter Blue for $8 per month, but many celebrities and news organizations made a point of refusing to pay for the service. Musk later returned the verified check marks to a handful of users he claimed to have paid for, and then later even more users.

"This is just an incredible self-own by Musk like from a historical timing perspective," Stamos said in an episode of the "Moderated Content" podcast that was 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 served as chief information security officer at Yahoo. He currently runs a cybersecurity firm and teaches at Stanford.

In the recent podcast, Stamos said that because of generative AI, society is on the verge of "a new age of bullshit" because the cost of generating content is "trending towards 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 going to be quite possibly completely unusable" because it will be difficult to distinguish AI bots from real humans — an issue Musk has previously said he aims to fix.

"Every single thing in which you have some kind of anonymity or pseudo-anonymity is going to be completely flooded by a small group of people who want to manipulate it," Stamos said. "Identity is a huge deal. Now identity is really, really going to be important over the next decade, and Twitter had one of the first and best recognized identity programs and they have completely destroyed it. They've made it a negative that people are begging to have it taken off."

"In such an age, trust in platforms' ability to prevent impersonation and to verify the identity of high-profile individuals and organizations is going to be critical," Stamos told Insider in a statement. "Musk's timing, destroying one of the oldest and best recognized verification programs, is uniquely stupid."

Musk did not respond to a request for comment ahead of publication. Twitter responded with an automated email that did not address Insider's question.

The former Facebook security chief also joked on the podcast that Musk's move was also a "masterclass in marketing" as celebrities took to Twitter to say that they had not paid for Twitter Blue and did not want to be associated with it.

Stamos is one of several people that have called Musk's plans for user verification on Twitter flawed. Earlier this week, top Tesla investor Ross Gerber told Insider's Hasan Chowdhury that the blue-check saga could indicate Twitter is on its last legs.