From the article: "The vigorous push also appears to include the grooming — not previously reported — of a Saudi employee at Twitter whom Western intelligence officials suspected of spying on user accounts to help the Saudi leadership."
The guy stayed in Twitter for 2 years before getting fired. It's rumored he was targeted after a team from Misk (MBS personal NGO) visited Twitter HQ in 2014/15 and discovered a Saudi working there.
The fact "they could not find evidence that he had handed over Twitter data to the Saudi government", yet they fired him AND notified some accounts that they could have targeted by a state-sponsored actor is ridiculous. He went back to work in Misk. That definitely says something.
You would think this would be a huge problem for the "fake news" crowd. This is a government attacking the image of a person that criticizes, not government policies, but the attitudes and character of people in government.
And if the Saudis are doing it, well, they're not known for innovation. This means
1) governments are doing this
2) they're "putting their own version of reality" forward. In other words: fake news.
3) ... when they're not doing it to just protect the personal public image of important politicians
That does mean that fake news ... just cannot be policed by governments. Those simply want their own, equally fake, version of reality given precedence.
A cynic might say that's exactly why we have the fake news debacle in the first place. That the main problem anti-"fake news" efforts are fighting is not the fake part of the news, but that real news was actually available, even if not easily, at all.
5 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 14.8 ms ] threadSeems like potentially a big deal.
The fact "they could not find evidence that he had handed over Twitter data to the Saudi government", yet they fired him AND notified some accounts that they could have targeted by a state-sponsored actor is ridiculous. He went back to work in Misk. That definitely says something.
And if the Saudis are doing it, well, they're not known for innovation. This means
1) governments are doing this
2) they're "putting their own version of reality" forward. In other words: fake news.
3) ... when they're not doing it to just protect the personal public image of important politicians
That does mean that fake news ... just cannot be policed by governments. Those simply want their own, equally fake, version of reality given precedence.
A cynic might say that's exactly why we have the fake news debacle in the first place. That the main problem anti-"fake news" efforts are fighting is not the fake part of the news, but that real news was actually available, even if not easily, at all.