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

Hold on

[Orgasmatron]

Project Veritas doesn't make claims. They secretly film other people making claims. In this case, it is 8 or 9 Twitter employees (some of them apparently not junior flunkies) claiming that they can and do read your private messages.

Re:Hold on

[AmiMoJo]

Settling for $100k sounds like losing to me. You don't just give someone $100,000 because you are going to win the lawsuit.

Re:Hold on

[Mashiki]

That's not a loss. He got hit with a privacy violation because the law required "notification of recording" failing to do that meant that they were guilty of a privacy violation. It doesn't disprove the videos as being true.

Debate fail

[Anonymous Coward]

Can't refute the videos he posted, could you?
So you attack the person who put them up.

I guess you failed in debating because I just called you out on your piss poor debating ability.
Looks like liberals are perfectly comfortable with censorship, reading private messages, and other crap Twitter does. Instead of attacking Twitter for being unethical, they attack the person who pointed it out with PROOF.

Good job letting us know liberals don't care about civil liberties.

Re:No shit

[bobbied]

Veritas is a master of the obvious truth hidden in plain sight. Of course folks at Twitter filter stuff...

The issue here though is by what standard they filter? Personally I don't care what Twitter does but the fools who are on the video explaining their personal bias presumably used in their filtering of Twitter feeds do make Twitter look bad in the eyes of some.

What we have here is a PR war with Veritas, which generally doesn't work out well for Veritas' targets. We are in full damage control mode by Twitter while Veritas sits back with who knows what kind of additional footage to prove anything Twitter's PR department puts out to fix this is a lie. My advice to Twitter is to shut up, make sure these folks on the video don't actually do what they claim and let it run it's course. It will pass in 2 weeks or less if you shut up.

Re:End-to-end encryption

[Sneeka2]

If anyone thinks any communication on Twitter or Facebook or anything like it is private in this sense, they need to reevaluate their head.

Re:No shit

[Anonymous Coward]

Veritas is a bullshit factory, and media reporting on them as if there's any doubt to that does the public a great disservice.

O'Keefe "losing" sounds a lot like winning

[Anonymous Coward]

O'Keefe destroys ACORN, one of the most powerful leftist organizations in American history, and it only cost him $100K.

And you call that O'Keefe losing? If that's the case, I hope O'Keefe keeps "losing" against Twitter, CNN, MSNBC, WaPo and the NYT!