Elon Musk is Buying Twitter for $44 Billion After the Least Sexiest Don’t-Want-She-Don’t-Want-Them Saga of All Time. And while Musk tried to reassure Advertisers yesterday that “Twitter can’t become a free hell, where everything can be said without consequences,” the acquisition raises practical questions about what the social network’s nearly 240 million active users can expect from the platform in the future.
Chief among these concerns are questions about how Twitter’s stances on user security and privacy might change in the Musk era. A number of Twitter’s top executives were fired last night, including CEO Parag Agrawal, the company’s general counsel Sean Edgett, and Vijaya Gadde, the company’s head of legal policy, trust and security, who was known for his efforts to protect user data. against law enforcement requests and injunctions. Gadde headed the committee that ousted Donald Trump from Twitter in January 2021 after the Capitol riots. Musk, meanwhile, said in May that he would like to put Trump back on the platform, calling the removal of the former US president “morally bad.”
This afternoon, Musk wrote that “Twitter will form a content moderation board with widely divergent views. There will be no major substantive decisions or account recovery before that council meets.”
Content moderation has real implications for user security on any platform, especially when it comes to hate speech and violent misinformation. But other topics, including the privacy of Twitter direct messages, protection against illegal government data requests, and the overall quality of Twitter’s security measures will come to the fore in the coming weeks. This is especially true in light of recent allegations made by former Twitter chief security officer Peiter “Mudge” Zatko, who described Twitter as deeply deficient in digital security in an August whistleblower report.
“Personally, I don’t know what to do, especially considering Mudge’s whistleblower complaint,” said Whitney Merrill, a privacy and data protection attorney and former Federal Trade Commission attorney. “I just don’t put sensitive data or data that I want to keep confidential in DMs.”
Twitter offers a resource downloading all the data it contains in your account, and viewing your own treasure is a good first step in understanding what information the company has associated with you. However, it’s unclear how much control you currently have over the deletion of this data, and the policy could continue to evolve under the Musk administration. For example, Twitter DMs only offer the “Delete for you” option, which means that messages will be deleted from your own account, but not for other users.
More generally, Twitter’s current policy on account deactivation simply says, “If you do not log back into your account within 30 days of deactivation, your account will be permanently deactivated. Once permanently deactivated, all information associated with your account is no longer available in our production tools.” It’s unclear what exactly this means in terms of long-term data retention and, again, policies may change in the future.
