US commerce panel probes Twitter information practices after Elon Musk’s layoffs

AP | | Posted by Aryan Prakash

The Federal Trade Commission is investigating Elon Musk’s mass layoffs at Twitter and attempting to acquire his inside communications as a part of ongoing oversight into the social media firm’s privateness and cybersecurity practices, based on paperwork described in a congressional report.

The FTC has been watching the corporate for years since Twitter agreed to a 2011 consent order alleging critical information safety lapses. But the company’s issues spiked with the tumult that adopted Musk’s Oct. 27 takeover of the corporate.

The Republican-led House Judiciary Committee revealed 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.”

ALSO READ: ‘Misunderstanding…’: Elon Musk apologizes after taunting sacked Twitter worker

The House stated the requests amounted to a deluge of “demands about its personnel decisions in each of the company’s departments, every internal communication relating to Elon Musk and even Twitter’s interactions with journalists” who Musk’s crew allowed to see sure worker emails and messages.

Those paperwork had been dubbed “The Twitter Files” and had been meant to point out how the corporate made choices to reasonable content material earlier than Musk took over.

In a response to the House report, the FTC stated, “Protecting consumers’ privacy is exactly what the FTC is supposed to do. It should come as no surprise that career staff at the commission are conducting a rigorous investigation into Twitter’s compliance with a consent order that came into effect long before Mr. Musk purchased the company.”

Twitter had already paid a $150 million penalty in May, 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 data safety.

But 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 doable violations amid issues that stories of Twitter’s dysfunction and drastically decreased workers below Musk posed critical safety dangers.

The FTC stated on the time it was “tracking recent developments at Twitter with deep concern.”

Source web site: www.hindustantimes.com

Rating
( No ratings yet )
Loading...