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Elon Musk is buying Twitter for $44 billion after the least horny will-they-won’t-they saga of all time. And whereas Musk attempted to reassure advertisers yesterday that “Twitter clearly can not grow to be a free-for-all hellscape, the place something could be mentioned with no penalties,” the acquisition raises sensible questions on what the social community’s practically 240 million energetic customers can expect from the platform sooner or later.
Chief amongst these issues are questions on how Twitter’s stances on person safety and privateness might change within the Musk period. Quite a few prime Twitter executives had been fired final night time, together with CEO Parag Agrawal, the corporate’s common counsel Sean Edgett, and Vijaya Gadde, the corporate’s head of authorized coverage, belief, and security who was recognized for working to guard person information from regulation enforcement requests and court docket orders. Gadde ran the committee that ousted Donald Trump from Twitter in January 2021 following the Capitol riots. Musk, in the meantime, mentioned in Could that he would wish to reinstate Trump on the platform and known as the previous US president’s removing “morally unhealthy.”
This afternoon, Musk wrote that “Twitter can be forming a content material moderation council with broadly various viewpoints. No main content material choices or account reinstatements will occur earlier than that council convenes.”
Content material moderation has actual implications for person safety on any platform, notably when it entails hate speech and violent misinformation. However different matters, together with the privateness of Twitter direct messages, safety from illegal authorities information requests, and the general high quality of Twitter’s safety protections, will loom giant within the coming weeks. That is notably true in mild of recent accusations from former Twitter chief safety officer Peiter “Mudge” Zatko, who described Twitter as having grossly insufficient digital safety defenses in an August whistleblower report.
“Personally, I don’t know what to do, particularly once you take Mudge’s whistleblower criticism into consideration,” says Whitney Merrill, a privateness and information safety lawyer and former Federal Commerce Fee lawyer. “I’m simply not placing any delicate information or information I’d like to remain confidential into DMs.”
Twitter offers a tool for downloading all the information it holds in your account, and reviewing your personal trove is an effective first step in understanding what info the corporate has linked to you. It is unclear, although, precisely how a lot management you presently have over deleting this information, and the insurance policies might proceed to evolve below the Musk administration. Twitter DMs, for instance, solely provide the choice to “Delete for You,” which means delete messages from your personal account however not for different customers.
Extra broadly, Twitter’s present coverage on account deactivation merely says, “If you don’t log again into your account for the 30 days following the deactivation, your account can be completely deactivated. As soon as completely deactivated, all info related along with your account is not accessible in our Manufacturing Instruments.” It’s unclear what precisely this implies when it comes to long-term information retention and, once more, insurance policies might change sooner or later.
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