The claims are as shocking as they are urgent. Far from being a well-run tech company, Twitter’s servers are running out-of-date software, and security staff withheld the number of breaches of user privacy from executives—all while the company has made little effort to understand the number of bots on its platform.
Those are some of the allegations made by Peiter “Mudge” Zatko, Twitter’s former chief of security, in an explosive story in The Washington Post.
Zatko, who has been labeled a whistleblower, also claims that Twitter acceded to a request by the Indian government to place an agent on its payroll to monitor user data while protests roiled the country. “If accurate, the revelations that Twitter employed and gave user-data access to an agent of the Indian government, or any government, should worry anyone concerned about free expression online,” says Sarah McLaughlin of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a nonpartisan, nonprofit free-speech advocacy group.
The legitimacy of the claims are in dispute, but the bigger question is, what does this mean for Twitter’s ongoing dispute with Elon Musk, whose $44 billion takeover of the social media company is now part of an active court case.
Unusually for a company that has been disharmonious in the months since Musk launched his takeover bid, Twitter’s rank and file employees have not flocked to support Zatko’s whistleblowing efforts. “The feeling inside is that Mudge is a bitter shit trying to get revenge...
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