Thread by @We3forDemocracy

Twitter has said that a recently-patched bug in its platform enabled software developers to read users’ private direct messages or protected tweets

The bug ran from May 2017 until it’s discovery on September 10 2018

Almost 1% of Twitter users affected threatpost.com/twitter-flaw-e…

May 2018, a Twitter flaw caused account passwords to be stored in plain text on internal log

A Twitter spokesperson told Threatpost the company is confident that the [private data] access was not misused 🙄😏

threatpost.com/twitter-flaw-e…

🐘Are all social media flaws accidental?🐘

Who has written various flawed software (not just on Twitter) that opened access to private data?

Was this accidental, or designed w an agenda?

Activists use Twitter.
Its been reported that govts and corps spy on non-violent activists.
(God forbid that free speech have meaning)

Twitter, for all its sins, is arguably a much better free speech platform than any of Facebook or Google’s products

Facebook & Google are particularly notorious for manipulating narratives 👉🏼by pushing ideas they like & suppressing certain ideas or discussions they don’t like

Twitter limited visibility of prominent Republicans in search results — a technique known as “shadow banning” — in what it says is a side effect of its attempts to improve the quality of discourse on the platform.

news.vice.com/en_us/article/…

It reversed the shadow banning of elites

Internet Service Providers should have neither the responsibility or authority to censor free speech/debate (bar individuals or sites that blatantly promote violence of any sort)

“Hate” speech is a highly subjective characterisation of speech - and is an inappropriate criteria

Its is fair for Internet Service Providers to regulate abuse of their system by advertising spammers and automated bots of any sort 👉🏼but there should be a system to appeal a block, especially as the algorithm “curiously” seems to falsely flag accounts that hold critical views.

Absolutely the worst form of censors are human moderators (and human, agenda-driven, fake,
so-called fact-checkers, of which there are many)

Human beings have various biases. You give them power to censor opinions they personally don’t like, and what do you think they will do?

Back to original tweet in this thread - and the question of whether or not data security flaws are being built in by engineers on Twitter etc

Consider the Twitter Engineer who said Twitter could provide any of @realDonaldTrump tweets to the DOJ, including ones he deleted and DMs

How is it that in January 2018 a Twitter engineer bragged Twitter could give the DOJ @realDonaldTrump deleted tweets and private DMs?

👉🏼But Twitter claims they did not “find” the flaw that enabled this until Sept 2018 (tho this flaw reportedly existed since at least May 2017)

IF data security flaws are being deliberately built in to Twitter, to spy on users (Twitter denied their engineers claim)👉🏼 it seems highly likely that the even more totalitarian Google and Facebook have been doing it too.

What about Amazon, Microsoft and Apple etc?