“That shit went out the window right after Elon came in,” one former
staffer says of Twitter’s previously routine transparency reports
Twitter
boss Elon Musk has railed against what he sees as U.S. government attempts
to “censor” the social media company.
“As (outgoing) Chair of House Intelligence, did you approve hidden
state censorship in direct violation of the Constitution of the United
States @RepAdamSchiff?” he asked one congressman in a tweet last
December.
Musk has also promised, over and over again, to build a more
transparent Twitter — one that makes it clear when a government agency
requests a user’s data, or asks to take an account offline. “Transparency is
the key to trust,” he tweeted around the same time.
For a
decade, Twitter published rundowns twice a year of all of those government
requests. But under Musk, that appears to have ended.
Despite
Musk’s rhetoric about government bullying of social media, his company
hasn’t published one of the formerly regular transparency reports detailing
what governments are demanding from Twitter — and whether the company is
bending to them.
It’s a development that’s horrified privacy advocates and
former Twitter employees alike.
“We entrust our most sensitive,
private, and important information to tech companies — they’re privy to the
conversations, photos, social connections, and location data of almost
everyone online,” Josh Richman, a spokesperson for the Electronic Freedom
Foundation, said in a statement. “The reports shed crucial light on whether
or not tech companies have users’ backs, or if they’re rolling over and
compromising users’ data. Any company that walks away from making such
reports is taking a big step backward.”
Musk did not immediately respond to Rolling Stone’s request for
comment on this story.
In years past, Twitter routinely published
data about how many demands it had received from governments, and how many
enforcement actions it had taken against users accounts or tweets. The
reports also detailed how and when Twitter fought the government over
requests or gag orders. In 2014, the company even sued the Obama
administration to quash a gag order and disclose its receipt of National
Security Letters, which allow law enforcement to obtain information from
Internet service providers without a warrant.
Twitter’s last transparency report — published in July
2022 and covering the last six months of 2021 — found that the U.S.
government made more requests for account data than any other government,
accounting for over 24 percent of Twitter’s global requests. The FBI,
Department of Justice, and Secret Service “consistently submitted the
greatest percentage of requests for the six previous reporting periods.”
Requests from the U.S. government were down seven percent from the last
reporting period but Twitter’s compliance rate went up 13 percent in the
latter half of 2021.
The kinds of transparency reports that Twitter used to publish
“can be really valuable in terms of showing which governments are making the
most requests, how much platforms are pushing back on government, what are
the trends over time and what kinds of things are they asking for,” Evelyn
Douek, a professor at Stanford Law School who studies technology and public
policy, tells Rolling Stone. “That can be a really important accountability
mechanism not just for platforms, but also governments. You see which
governments are applying the most pressure to platforms.”
The Musk-approved Twitter Files posts have offered glimpses of
government officials making demands on Twitter. But the releases provide
only a small — and politically selective — window on the company’s
relationships with officialdom. The lack of a clear commitment to continued
transparency reports going forward means that Twitter users could have less
information about how the company is handling their data, despite Musk’s
rhetoric.
“Elon talked a lot about the power of
transparency. But the way Elon and his enablers interpret transparency is a
rather creative use of the word. It’s not meaningful transparency in the way
the industry defines it,” one former Twitter employee familiar with the
reports tells Rolling Stone.
It’s unclear whether Twitter will continue to publish such
reports or if the company even has the ability to, given its lack of staff.
The reports, three former staffers familiar with them say, were labor
intensive even when the company was fully staffed.
“We
were working on the transparency reports, then all the program leads were
immediately fired, and the remaining people that could’ve worked on the
reports all left subsequently,” one former staffer says. “I’m not aware of
any people left [at Twitter] who could produce these transparency
reports.”
The former Twitter staffer adds, “It’s really a problem that
there’s no transparency data from 2022 anywhere.”
It’s one of
several topics that Musk’s Twitter has go ne silent on, former employees
say.
“There’s meat-and-potatoes transparency, the kind that’s
required by a bunch of international regulations. That’s no longer being
done. Then there’s the fancy, extra transparency around information
operations and inauthentic behavior. That shit went out the window right
after Elon came in,” the former staffer says.
As Rolling Stone reported in December, Twitter’s Trust
and Safety staff was prepared to publish a report about a network of troll
accounts linked to the Chinese government and dedicated to harassment of
women journalists reporting on human rights abuses in the country. That
report, along with “dozens” of others about foreign government troll
networks that Twitter staff had completed in the days before its sale, was
never published.
Musk himself appears somewhat resistant to the idea of
reporting on government efforts to manipulate his platform. In early
February, he criticized reporting from the State Department’s Global
Engagement Center calling out Russian influence operations as “government
censorship & media manipulation” and “a threat to our democracy.”
