Twitter Hits Back Again at Claims That Its Employees Monitor Direct Messages (techcrunch.com)

From a report on TechCrunch: Twitter is pushing back against claims made by conservative activist group Project Veritas that its employees monitor private user data, including direct messages. In a statement to BuzzFeed News, a Twitter representative said "we do not proactively review DMs. Period. A limited number of employees have access to such information, for legitimate work purposes, and we enforce strict access protocols for those employees." Last week, Project Veritas, which produces undercover sting operations that purportedly expose liberal biases at media companies and other organizations, posted footage that appeared to show Twitter engineers claiming that teams of employees look at users' private data. One engineer seemed to say that Twitter can hand over President Donald Trump's data, including deleted tweets and direct messages, to the Department of Justice.

Comments

Project Veritas is anything but

[JoshuaZ]

Veritas means truth. In that context, it is worth keeping in mind that this is James O'Keefe who runs it, a man who has repeatedly demonstrated his willingness to edit videos and take anything out of context http://www.cracked.com/article_20369_5-major-news-stories-that-forgot-to-tell-you-best-part.html https://www.npr.org/2011/03/14/134525412/Segments-Of-NPR-Gotcha-Video-Taken-Out-Of-Context are two detailed examples. This is a man who literally lied about who he was as part of an attempt to bug a US Senator's phone http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2010/01/acorn_gotcha_man_arrested_for.html. Pretty much anything he says should be assigned zero credibility. It may well be that Twitter employees are reading direct messages routinely, or even doing so for political aims, but anything by Project Veritas should not be taken as serious evidence for such a claim.

Re:Project Veritas is anything but

[Anonymous Coward]

Project Veritas releases the unedited raw videos of all of their undercover operations. Critics like yourself can only point to the ACORN videos from 7 years ago and shoot the messenger rather than debate any of the content at hand. Which parts of the Twitter videos were edited?

Re:Hold on

[Train0987]

He doesn't do anything differently than any other news org by editing content for time, except OKeefe always releases the full unedited footage (which the other outlets never do).

Re:Hold on

[AmiMoJo]

The full footage in previous cases only came out due to lawsuits filed against him, which he lost.

If he edits for time then he is very bad at it, because the resulting video tends to portray people as saying and doing things that they didn't say or do.