FTC probes Twitter knowledge practices after Elon Musk’s layoffs

The Federal Business Fee is investigating Elon Musk’s mass layoffs at Twitter and looking to download his inner communications as a part of ongoing oversight into the social media corporate’s privateness and cybersecurity practices, in step with paperwork described in a congressional file.

The FTC has been looking at the corporate for years since Twitter agreed to a 2011 consent order alleging severe knowledge safety lapses. However the company’s issues spiked with the tumult that adopted Musk’s Oct. 27 takeover of the corporate.

The Republican-led Area Judiciary Committee printed excerpts from the FTC’s letters Tuesday as a part of a file alleging that the company was once overreaching “to annoy Elon Musk’s Twitter.”

The Area stated the requests amounted to a deluge of “calls for about its team of workers choices in each and every of the corporate’s departments, each and every inner communique on the subject of Elon Musk or even Twitter’s interactions with reporters” who Musk’s staff allowed to look sure worker emails and messages.

The ones paperwork had been dubbed “The Twitter Information” and had been supposed to turn how the corporate made choices to average content material earlier than Musk took over.

In a reaction to the Area file, the FTC stated, “Protective shoppers’ privateness is precisely what the FTC is meant to do. It must come as no wonder that occupation body of workers on the fee are engaging in a rigorous investigation into Twitter’s compliance with a consent order that got here into impact lengthy earlier than Mr. Musk bought the corporate.”

Twitter had already paid a $150 million penalty in Would possibly, about 5 months earlier than Musk’s takeover, for violating the 2011 consent order. An up to date model established new procedures requiring the corporate to put in force an enhanced privacy-protection program in addition to beefing up knowledge safety.

However in November, a bunch of Democratic senators known as the ones commitments into query and requested the FTC—led by way of Chair Lina Khan, a Democrat—to research any imaginable violations amid issues that studies of Twitter’s dysfunction and vastly lowered body of workers below Musk posed severe safety dangers.

The FTC stated on the time it was once “monitoring contemporary tendencies at Twitter with deep fear.”

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