Business and Technology
Twitter Whistleblower Sounds Alarm on The Hill
Twitter whistleblower Peiter Zatko told the US Congress on Tuesday that the platform ignored his security concerns, as its shareholders decide whether to approve a $44 billion takeover deal that Elon Musk is trying to exit.
"I'm here today because Twitter leadership is misleading the public, lawmakers, regulators and even its own board of directors," Zatko, a hacker widely known as "Mudge" who was Twitter's former security chief, told the hearing.
He said that, during his time as head of security for the platform from late 2020 until his dismissal in January this year, he tried to alert management to grave vulnerabilities to hacking or data theft, to no avail.
"They don't know what data they have, where it lives, or where it came from. And so, unsurprisingly, they can't protect it," Zatko said during his opening remarks to the Judiciary Committee.
"Employees then have to have too much access (...) it doesn't matter who has the keys if you don't have any locks on the doors."
Zatko testified that he brought concrete evidence of problems to the executive team and "repeatedly sounded the alarm".
"To put it bluntly, Twitter leadership ignored its engineers because key parts of leadership lacked competency to understand the scope of the problem," he said.
"But more importantly, their executive incentives led them to prioritize profits over security."
Twitter has dismissed 51-year-old Zatko's complaint as being without merit.
But revelations of his whistleblower report in the US press in August were perfectly timed for Tesla chief Elon Musk, who has used it as part of his justification for abandoning his unsolicited $44 billion bid to buy Twitter.
In his report, Zatko directly refers to questions asked by Musk about bot accounts on Twitter, saying the company's tools and teams for finding such accounts are insufficient.
Musk has listed bot accounts as among the reasons to justify his walking away from the deal. Twitter is suing to force him to complete the buyout, with a trial set to go ahead on October 17.
If the court focuses on the fact that the world's richest man declined to do fact gathering typically associated with big-money mergers, Zatko's allegations could wind up being moot.
"Once both parties step into court it's a high risk/high reward scenario for both parties with the major X variable now being the Zatko whistleblower claims," Wedbush analyst Dan Ives said in a note to investors.
"We continue to view the Zatko situation as a Pandora's Box scenario for Twitter."
If Twitter prevails at trial, the judge could order the Tesla chief to pay billions of dollars to the company, or even complete the purchase.
Twitter shareholders are expected to endorse the buyout deal in a special vote Tuesday.
Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal declined to testify at Tuesday's hearing, citing the Musk litigation, Senator Chuck Grassley said.
Zatko insisted he had not made his revelations "out of spite or to harm Twitter."
"Far from that, I continue to believe in the mission of the company," he told Tuesday's hearing.
Zatko, incidentally, did work within the U.S. government as part of DARPA, a Department of Defense unit credited with being the genesis of today's internet.
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Meta Closes Monitoring Tool for Disinformation, Fact-Checking
WASHINGTON—A digital tool considered vital in tracking viral falsehoods, CrowdTangle will be decommissioned by Facebook owner Meta in a major election year, a move researchers fear will disrupt efforts to detect an expected firehose of political misinformation.
The tech giant says CrowdTangle will be unavailable after August 14, less than three months before the US election. The Palo Alto company plans to replace it with a new tool that researchers say lacks the same functionality, and which news organizations will largely not have access to.
For years, CrowdTangle has been a game-changer, offering researchers and journalists crucial real-time transparency into the spread of conspiracy theories and hate speech on influential Meta-owned platforms, including Facebook and Instagram.
Killing off the monitoring tool, a move experts say is in line with a tech industry trend of rolling back transparency and security measures, is a major blow as dozens of countries hold elections this year -- a period when bad actors typically spread false narratives more than ever.
"In a year where almost half of the global population is expected to vote in elections, cutting off access to CrowdTangle will severely limit independent oversight of harms," Melanie Smith, director of research at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, told AFP.
"It represents a grave step backwards for social media platform transparency."
Meta is set to replace CrowdTangle with a new Content Library, a technology still under development.
It's a tool that some in the tech industry, including former CrowdTangle chief executive Brandon Silverman, said is currently not an effective replacement, especially in elections likely to see a proliferation of AI-enabled falsehoods.
"It's an entire new muscle" that Meta is yet to build to protect the integrity of elections, Silverman told AFP, calling for "openness and transparency."
'Direct threat'
In recent election cycles, researchers say CrowdTangle alerted them to harmful activities including foreign interference, online harassment and incitements to violence.
By its own admission, Meta — which bought CrowdTangle in 2016 — said that in 2019 elections in Louisiana, the tool helped state officials identify misinformation, such as inaccurate poll hours that had been posted online.
In the 2020 presidential vote, the company offered the tool to US election officials across all states to help them "quickly identify misinformation, voter interference and suppression."
The tool also made dashboards available to the public to track what major candidates were posting on their official and campaign pages.
Lamenting the risk of losing these functions forever, global nonprofit Mozilla Foundation demanded in an open letter to Meta that CrowdTangle be retained at least until January 2025.
"Abandoning CrowdTangle while the Content Library lacks so much of CrowdTangle's core functionality undermines the fundamental principle of transparency," said the letter signed by dozens of tech watchdogs and researchers.
The new tool lacks CrowdTangle features including robust search flexibility and decommissioning it would be a "direct threat" to the integrity of elections, it added.
Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said the letter's claims are "just wrong," insisting the Content Library will contain "more comprehensive data than CrowdTangle" and be made available to academics and non-profit election integrity experts.
'Lot of concerns'
Meta, which has been moving away from news across its platforms, will not make the new tool accessible to for-profit media.
Journalists have used CrowdTangle in the past to investigate public health crises as well as human rights abuses and natural disasters.
Meta's decision to cut off journalists comes after many used CrowdTangle to report unflattering stories, including its flailing moderation efforts and how its gaming app was overrun with pirated content.
CrowdTangle has been a crucial source of data that helped "hold Meta accountable for enforcing its policies," Tim Harper, a senior policy analyst at the Center for Democracy & Technology, told AFP.
Organizations that debunk misinformation as part of Meta's third-party fact-checking program, including AFP, will have access to the Content Library.
But other researchers and nonprofits will have to apply for access or look for expensive alternatives. Two researchers told AFP under condition of anonymity that in one-on-one meetings with Meta officials, they demanded firm commitments from company officials.
"While most fact-checkers already working with Meta will have access to the new tool, it's not super clear if many independent researchers — already worried about losing CrowdTangle's functionality — will," Carlos Hernandez-Echevarria, head of the Spanish nonprofit Maldita, told AFP.
"It has generated a lot of concerns."
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