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

[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

[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.

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?

Claim not backed by evidence

[Nidi62]

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.

All that says is that Twitter stores the data, not that they are reading it. I see no problem there. Also, shouldn't Trump tweets be considered official correspondence and statements from the administration (I believe the White House has even stated this at some points) and therefore be illegal for Trump to delete anyway?

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.

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!