FTC probes Twitter information practices after Elon Musk’s layoffs

The Federal Business Fee is investigating Elon Musk’s mass layoffs at Twitter and seeking 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 staring at the corporate for years since Twitter agreed to a 2011 consent order alleging severe information 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 bother Elon Musk’s Twitter.”

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

The ones paperwork have been dubbed “The Twitter Recordsdata” and have been intended to turn how the corporate made choices to reasonable content material prior to Musk took over.

In a reaction to the Area file, the FTC stated, “Protective customers’ privateness is precisely what the FTC is meant to do. It will have to come as no wonder that profession group of workers on the fee are carrying out a rigorous investigation into Twitter’s compliance with a consent order that got here into impact lengthy prior to Mr. Musk bought the corporate.”

Twitter had already paid a $150 million penalty in Might, about 5 months prior to 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 data safety.

However in November, a gaggle of Democratic senators known as the ones commitments into query and requested the FTC—led via Chair Lina Khan, a Democrat—to research any conceivable violations amid issues that experiences of Twitter’s dysfunction and enormously lowered group of workers below Musk posed severe safety dangers.

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

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