Elon Musk has instructed the current head of trust and safety to provide screenshots of users’ accounts, granting outside journalists access to internal Twitter Inc. data that has never before been granted.
Journalist Bari Weiss shared screenshots of internal systems on Thursday that were restricted to a relatively small group of individuals in charge of content moderation.
According to people with knowledge of Twitter’s systems, the watermarked screenshots, taken since December 7, 2022, raised questions about whether Weiss had access to Irwin’s internal account, which would also mean access to sensitive information like a user’s private messages.
Irwin later clarified that in order to avoid this, she took the screenshots herself. Irwin stated on Twitter that the screenshots were requested for security reasons so that no PII, or personally identifiable information, was exposed. They did not grant this access to reporters, and no, journalists were not gaining access to user DMs, the company said.
The watermarks were allegedly added to employee accounts following Twitter’s hack in 2020 in an effort to help Twitter identify the source of screenshots taken from its internal systems.
A request for comment from Weiss was not immediately complied with.
The internal documents and emails from former Twitter employees are part of the “Twitter Files,” which Musk gave to outside journalists who are now publishing them. The screenshots were shared as part of this collection.
Weiss and another writer, Matt Taibbi, have unrestricted access to the Twitter Files, according to statements made by Musk earlier this month. People who are familiar with Twitter’s operating system are worried that such extensive access might cause Twitter to break its 2022 privacy agreement with the Federal Trade Commission.
Alex Stamos, who formerly oversaw security at Meta Platforms Inc. and is now at the Stanford Internet Observatory, tweeted that he feels like Weiss’ thread should be enough for the FTC to conduct an investigation into a violation of the settlement agreement and perhaps get a court order for Twitter’s internal access logs.
According to a provision of Twitter’s FTC agreement, employees are only permitted access to sensitive user account data if they have a legitimate business reason to do so. The company’s executives who would have authorized that access or would have looked into its abuse have left.
Weiss tweeted on Thursday that the authors have extensive and growing access to Twitter’s files. The only requirement they agreed to was that the information be posted on Twitter first.
