The Federal Commerce Fee is investigating Elon Musk’s mass layoffs at Twitter and attempting to acquire his inner communications as a part of ongoing oversight into the social media firm’s privateness and cybersecurity practices, in keeping with paperwork described in a congressional report.
The FTC has been watching the corporate for years since Twitter agreed to a 2011 consent order alleging severe knowledge safety lapses. However the company’s considerations spiked with the tumult that adopted Musk’s Oct. 27 takeover of the corporate.
The Republican-led Home Judiciary Committee printed excerpts from the FTC’s letters Tuesday as a part of a report alleging that the company was overreaching “to harass Elon Musk’s Twitter.”
The Home mentioned the requests amounted to a deluge of “calls for about its personnel selections in every of the corporate’s departments, each inner communication regarding Elon Musk and even Twitter’s interactions with journalists” who Musk’s group allowed to see sure worker emails and messages.
These paperwork had been dubbed “The Twitter Recordsdata” and had been meant to point out how the corporate made selections to reasonable content material earlier than Musk took over.
In a response to the Home report, the FTC mentioned, “Defending shoppers’ privateness is strictly what the FTC is meant to do. It ought to come as no shock that profession workers on the fee are conducting 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 Could, 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 implement an enhanced privacy-protection program in addition to beefing up info safety.
However in November, a bunch of Democratic senators known as these commitments into query and requested the FTC—led by Chair Lina Khan, a Democrat—to analyze any attainable violations amid considerations that studies of Twitter’s dysfunction and drastically lowered workers underneath Musk posed severe safety dangers.
The FTC mentioned on the time it was “monitoring current developments at Twitter with deep concern.”
