"We’ve confirmed that Irwin has access to user DMs as part of her position. Given the way the company has handled the Twitter Files, multiple former employees told us that DMs are no longer secure, and have discouraged us from using them for any remotely sensitive communication."
https://www.platformer.news/p/another-whistleblower-comes-for-twitter @caseynewton @zoeschiffer
@drewharwell DMs were never secure. The only way DMs could have been secure is if they’d been end-to-end encrypted. They were always insecure but some folks were fine with who had access to them.
It’s similar to building a surveillance state under Obama and then freaking out when Trump gets access to it. Perhaps we have to start thinking about not building such things or accepting them to begin with even if it’s our friends who are running them at the time.
@aral @drewharwell @caseynewton @zoeschiffer I have educated Swedish reporters on digital source protection for many years, and have repeated this over and over again.
And yet, even in 2023, I see reporters using Twitter (and other social media services) to find sources, offering source protection but no other contact way than DMs.
And this is not about Twitter. This is about understanding tools and choosing the right one.
@anders @drewharwell @caseynewton @zoeschiffer A magazine once asked a bunch of us to literally say “I told you so” about surveillance-based tech (or “people farming” as I call it). I told them I’d only do it if I could point out their own hyprocrisy as a company reliant on adtech. The result:
(I can’t believe that was five years ago.)
We should have known that Facebook was abusing our data. Why? Because lots of privacy activists told us so. Since most of them are too good of a human to rub that in our nose, we went ahead and forced them to accept our spoonfed quote. Hope
@aral @anders @drewharwell @caseynewton @zoeschiffer
it's way worse than just direct messages
if you're doing any comms or organizing for antifascist causes, assume your identity is leaked to fascists
assume your email, your phone number, your ip addresses are already doxxed
and it doesn't help to start using a vpn now, because twitter has your history from when you didn't use a vpn
you'd need to create a new account using the vpn, and only disclose phone number and email that aren't linked to you, and only access twitter from the vpn
pre-elmo twitter had a good reputation for defending anon users from fascists, but that's all over now
@ares Oh yeah, Twitter’s gone full fascist. I used to call Elon Musk “proto-fascist” (as in “proto-fascist billionaire man-baby”) but I’ve dropped the “proto” recently.
(My point was more on the slippery slope of neoliberalism / surveillance capitalism that builds the infrastructure for fascism. All the fascists have to do then is to move in.)
Drew Harwell
Aral Balkan
Anders Thoresson
ares