Tom CoatesA particularly catastrophic day at Twitter. The people reassuring advertisers yesterday that everything was fine quit, along with the heads of trust and safety, ad sales and most importantly the three people who were responsible for filing a document to the FTC detailing their protections in place for user data. Those three were the heads of information security, compliance and privacy. When they leave like that you know it’s bad. Law-breaking, privacy violating, insecure bad.
Mona Sigal MD@tomcoates glad that today was the day I deactivated my account of 11 years. It’s unfathomable to remain on that platform
Dame Holly@mona @tomcoates I find the trashfire mesmerising 😮
@DameHolly @mona it is hard to turn away. That’s for certain.
waferbaby@tomcoates I'm just astounded at how fast it's all unraveling.
@d yeah I’m surprised too.
Angie@tomcoates it's like a horror movie but really happening.
Neil Polowin@tomcoates There are gonna be *so many* business school case studies written about this.
Scott Jenson@neilpolowin @tomcoates There are going to be so many children's books written about this...
Zorro Notorious MEB@neilpolowin @tomcoates Business law school classes, you mean?
@znmeb @tomcoates I was thinking more of a typical MBA curriculum but business law fits, too. My profs at Bentley would have had a field day with this.
@neilpolowin @tomcoates IMHO he is inches away from a life-changing lawsuit he cannot ignore.
@tomcoates Yep - MuskmElon is inches away from a wealth-crushing lawsuit or even a regulatory agency forcing him to do some things he does not want to do.
Stefan Scholl@tomcoates American labor laws are strange. I had to stay 4 1/2 months after I gave notice.
@Stefan_S_from_H Britain’s the same. Potentially very long notice periods in which you’re expected to not be an asshole. America seems to have trouble with the idea of personal responsibility and self control though.
@tomcoates Lawsuit bad - the only question is whether MuskmElon will file one first.
⚳ rapid unscheduled assembly ⚳@tomcoates Today I deleted all my tweets and then deleted my account. (Hello! It's a me, over here.) I know a couple of the high-profile quitters and they wouldn't leave if there were anything else they could do. My assumption is that they were being asked to perjure themselves and they wouldn't do that.
@coregaze I think that’s absolutely right.
Jeffrey Goldberg@tomcoates My speculation (I have no inside knowledge) is that Musk sought to deliberately provoke the FTC into acting so he could pretend to be the victim of government persecution. Naturally, the Compliance, Security, and Privacy leads would have none of that and walked.
@jpgoldberg it’s an interesting theory certainly. I’m not 100% convinced. Seems more likely that he just doesn’t care about laws because he’s a billionaire and nothing he does has consequences
@tomcoates Well, we now know that he has since sent email to all (remaining) Twitter employees absolutely denying any rumors that he wasn't going to comply with the FTC consent order.
So even if those "rumors" were completely false, it now appears that some people inside Twitter were worried about deliberate non-compliance.
Glotblot@tomcoates Does this mean Elon will have to ONLY buy fruit that is on sale at the grocery store, or can he still just buy whatever fruit he wants?
xian@tomcoates have you deactivated over there yet?
@mediajunkie no. I’m going to stick around in some capacity. Part of this is about not being prepared to give up the audience. Part of it is that it’s just the best place to communicate how terribly Musk is doing. Feels like we shouldn’t cede territory to bigots and morons if we can avoid it. Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t spread ourselves out a bit though
@tomcoates same same for me now but i want to be careful how the data is about to get abused & and the int’l infosec environment
Sam Jack@tomcoates With the speed of the unraveling, I’m concerned about the Twitter archive - the trillions of historic tweets that are sitting on servers somewhere. Is anyone going to make it their business to preserve those if/when the company goes bankrupt? The Library of Congress announced plans to archive all tweets, but they gave up that idea years ago. The loss to current and future scholars would be profound.
Pseudo Nym@samtjack @tomcoates hey @textfiles I assume archive.org have something in place to try and crawl public Twitter before it all goes away?
Anything we can point people at to help grab copies of stuff before it's gone?
Can people grab their individual data downloads and share them with archive.org ?
Kathy E. Gill 🇺🇦@pseudonym @samtjack @tomcoates @textfiles
Go to archive.org and request an archive of twitter handles that you think are imperative to save. I don't know if you need an account to do that. (Maybe?)
But that will NOT grab media, unfortunately.
Here's the infamous @TesIaReal account there:
I was the first to archive it but there are now five instances.
https://web.archive.org/web/20220000000000*/https://twitter.com/TesIaReal
@pseudonym @samtjack @tomcoates @textfiles
Of course, you can archive your own account!
Here are some of the accounts on archive.org (a random list)
https://twitter.com/GreatDismal
https://twitter.com/HC_Richardson
https://twitter.com/joshtpm
https://twitter.com/Kate_Kelly_Esq
https://twitter.com/NASA_Astronauts
Good lord. Mine is there. What?
@kegill @samtjack @tomcoates @textfiles
And, for anything looking for the direct link to request a page be saved:
Sam, there are a lot of tweets at archive.org ... if anyone could have access to that pipe, I'm guessing it would be one of the major ad agencies.
Barbara@tomcoates ☹️ The big Boy hast bought a toy and breaks it right away. 🙃
JH@tomcoates Thanks Tom. Do I need to delete my account to be safe, or just leave it dormant?
@jh1 probably not. Mostly you should just be very suspicious of anyone with a verified tick. You should expect them to be a troll or a potential con artist, pretty much like everywhere else.