Twitter is under an onerous FTC consent decree that could lead to billions in fines, but is being ignored and/or attempting to pass responsibility off on individual engineers
Here’s part of the internal Slack message sent by a leader on Twitter's legal team:
> Over the last two weeks. Elon has shown that he cares only about recouping the losses he’s incurring as a result of failing to get out of his binding obligation to buy Twitter. He chose to enter into that agreement! All of us are being put through this as a result of the choices he made.
> Elon has shown that his only priority with Twitter users is how to monetize them. I do not believe he cares about the human rights activists. the dissidents, our users in un-monetizable regions, and all the other users who have made Twitter the global town square you have all spent so long building, and we all love.
> I have heard Alex Spiro (current head of Legal) say that Elon is willing to take on a huge amount of risk in relation to this company and its users, because “Elon puts rockets into space, he’s not afraid of the FTC.” I have heard another leader in the Legal department say that because of the tight SLA’s (of two weeks?!) between product inception > launch, Legal will “have to shift the burden to engineers” to self-certify compliance with FTC requirements and other laws. This will put huge amount of personal, professional and legal risk onto engineers: I anticipate that all of you will de pressured by management into pushing out changes that will likely lead to major incidents.
> All of this is extremely dangerous for our users. Also, given that the FTC can (and will!) fine Twitter BILLIONS of dollars pursuant to the FTC Consent Order, extremely detrimental to Twitter’s longevity as a platform. Our users deserve so much better than this.
> If you feel uncomfortable about anything you’re being asked to do, you can call Twitter’s Ethics Hotline at (800) 275-4843 or submit a report at ethicshelpline.twitter.com. Please also note the FTC’s number is: 1-877-FTC-HELP. You may also remember that Mudge reached out to httos://whistlebloweraid.org
> I wish you all luck. It’s been such an honor to work with all of you. And I’ll be taking a day of PTO today.
> "We are tracking recent developments at Twitter with deep concern. No CEO or company is above the law, and companies must follow our consent decrees."
> TWITTER EXECUTIVES ROBIN WHEELER, YOEL ROTH ARE DEPARTING
> Yoel is a notable one as he was publicly supportive of Elon and was frequently retweeted by Elon as a way to show efforts to improve the service were working
It is truly incredible how Musk has this complete disregard for the American legal system (smoking weed on JRE while having a security clearance, sexual assault allegations on the company plane, taking Tesla private at $420, etc). It’s just baffling that the government continues to not act on any of these things. Seems like the only thing he’s been held accountable on was the Twitter deal but even that was on his own terms instead of the Delaware courts.
I don’t see how a 2018 tweet proves the 2021 release of verifying information that an investor was indeed willing and able and committed via assertion to fund the transaction.
The SECs settlement seemed particularly eggregious.
Amazing to watch a guy troll his way into a corner. Men of privileged background really, really do not know how to deal with this alien to them thing called "consequence". It's just meltdown.
17 comments
[ 0.19 ms ] story [ 46.2 ms ] threadTwitter link for those who use twitter: https://twitter.com/CaseyNewton/status/1590724257608134657
CISO announcing the same: https://nitter.it/LeaKissner/status/1590706305102381058#m
https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/10/23451198/twitter-ftc-elo...
Twitter is under an onerous FTC consent decree that could lead to billions in fines, but is being ignored and/or attempting to pass responsibility off on individual engineers
https://www.ftc.gov/sites/default/files/documents/cases/2010...
Here’s part of the internal Slack message sent by a leader on Twitter's legal team:
> Over the last two weeks. Elon has shown that he cares only about recouping the losses he’s incurring as a result of failing to get out of his binding obligation to buy Twitter. He chose to enter into that agreement! All of us are being put through this as a result of the choices he made.
> Elon has shown that his only priority with Twitter users is how to monetize them. I do not believe he cares about the human rights activists. the dissidents, our users in un-monetizable regions, and all the other users who have made Twitter the global town square you have all spent so long building, and we all love.
> I have heard Alex Spiro (current head of Legal) say that Elon is willing to take on a huge amount of risk in relation to this company and its users, because “Elon puts rockets into space, he’s not afraid of the FTC.” I have heard another leader in the Legal department say that because of the tight SLA’s (of two weeks?!) between product inception > launch, Legal will “have to shift the burden to engineers” to self-certify compliance with FTC requirements and other laws. This will put huge amount of personal, professional and legal risk onto engineers: I anticipate that all of you will de pressured by management into pushing out changes that will likely lead to major incidents.
> All of this is extremely dangerous for our users. Also, given that the FTC can (and will!) fine Twitter BILLIONS of dollars pursuant to the FTC Consent Order, extremely detrimental to Twitter’s longevity as a platform. Our users deserve so much better than this.
> If you feel uncomfortable about anything you’re being asked to do, you can call Twitter’s Ethics Hotline at (800) 275-4843 or submit a report at ethicshelpline.twitter.com. Please also note the FTC’s number is: 1-877-FTC-HELP. You may also remember that Mudge reached out to httos://whistlebloweraid.org
> I wish you all luck. It’s been such an honor to work with all of you. And I’ll be taking a day of PTO today.
-----
Edit:
The FTC has now made a statement
https://twitter.com/cat_zakrzewski/status/159074977361917132...
> "We are tracking recent developments at Twitter with deep concern. No CEO or company is above the law, and companies must follow our consent decrees."
https://twitter.com/anthony/status/1590822724946956289
> TWITTER EXECUTIVES ROBIN WHEELER, YOEL ROTH ARE DEPARTING
> Yoel is a notable one as he was publicly supportive of Elon and was frequently retweeted by Elon as a way to show efforts to improve the service were working
The SECs settlement seemed particularly eggregious.