Whistleblower: Twitter misled investors, FTC and underplayed spam issues
According to an explosive whistleblower complaint from its former security chief, Twitter executives deceived federal regulators and the company’s own board of directors about “extreme, egregious deficiencies” in its defenses against hackers, as well as its meager efforts to fight spam. The whistleblower alleges that Twitter misled investors, the FTC and underplayed spam issues.
The complaint from former Twitter head of security Peiter Zatko, a widely admired hacker known as “Mudge,” depicts Twitter as a chaotic and rudderless company beset by infighting, unable to properly protect its 238 million daily users including government agencies, heads of state and other influential public figures.
Regarding the allegations about spam and bots, Twitter spokeswoman Rebecca Hahn said Twitter removes more than a million spam accounts every day, adding up to more than 300 million per year.
Four people familiar with Twitter’s efforts to fight spam said the company deploys extensive manual and automated tools to both measure the extent of spam across the service and reduce it.
“The claims I’ve received from a Twitter whistleblower raise serious national security concerns as well as privacy issues, and they must be investigated further,” said Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee.
The FTC investigated and sued Twitter in a case that led to one of the first big privacy consent orders with a tech company.
Twitter continued to suffer high-profile hacks and security violations, including in 2017, when a contract worker briefly took over Trump’s account, and in the 2020 hack, in which a Florida teen tricked Twitter employees and won access to verified accounts.
A former FTC official who worked on the case said the agency was badly understaffed at the time, and that the enforcement division had failed to keep a close eye on multiple companies after reaching privacy settlements, including the one with Twitter.
Spam bots – computer programs that tweet automatically – have long vexed Twitter.
Wall Street has pressed Twitter about bots because the company historically included some automated accounts in its quarterly estimate of daily users – even though those accounts don’t see ads and therefore Twitter can’t earn money off them.
In every quarterly SEC filing since, Twitter has estimated that fewer than 5 percent of the monetizable daily users are spam and bots.
Zatko cites a “Sensitive source” who said Twitter was afraid to determine that number because it “Would harm the image and valuation of the company.” He says the company’s tools for detecting spam are far less robust than implied in various statements.
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More on the case: (Read the Washington Post Article)