New Delhi: The Indian government may have “forced” Twitter to put one of its agents on the social media giant’s payroll and give this agent access to user data when there were “intense protests” in the country.
The revelation, made in a 23 August article in The Washington Post, is based on a complaint from Twitter’s former security head Peiter Zatko, a hacker who goes by the nickname ‘Mudge’.
Zatko’s complaint was filed last month with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, the Department of Justice, and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).
The Washington Post article says Zatko “believed the Indian government had forced Twitter to put one of its agents on the payroll, with access to user data at a time of intense protests in the country”.
According to the report, Zatko’s complaint said information to support this claim has been shared with the US National Security Division of the Justice Department and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
A spokesperson for the US Senate Intelligence Committee told the newspaper that the committee is “trying to set up a meeting with Zatko to discuss the complaint in detail”.
The Post article cites an unnamed person to say the claim about a Twitter employee actually being an Indian government agent was “probably” correct.
A Twitter spokesperson, on ThePrint’s request for comment about the India-related claim and the article, responded via email to say: “Mr Zatko was fired from his senior executive role at Twitter in January 2022 for ineffective leadership and poor performance. What we’ve seen so far is a false narrative about Twitter and our privacy and data security practices that is riddled with inconsistencies and inaccuracies and lacks important context.”
“Mr Zatko’s allegations and opportunistic timing appear designed to capture attention and inflict harm on Twitter, its customers and its shareholders. Security and privacy have long been company-wide priorities at Twitter and will continue to be,” added the spokesperson.
An Indian government official whom ThePrint called for comment denied the claim, adding sarcastically: “I would be so happy if I was on Twitter’s payroll.”
Also read: Twitter goes to court against Centre over ‘content takedown’ orders
‘Laughably untrue’
According to another senior government official, “this sort of egregious disinformation would have been droll had it not been deeply embedded in malice and reflected the individual’s jaundiced view of the Government of India.”
“At one level, it reads like pulp fiction; at another level, it exposes the sinister agenda of key personnel in Big Tech companies and how they perceive the role of intermediary platforms like Twitter: not as open, free and democratic digital town halls but weaponised technology to subvert democracies. When they fall through the net of their deceit, they level allegations that are laughably untrue,” the official said.
“In any case, the Government of India does not need to take recourse to subterfuge. Under India’s sovereign IT Rules and extant IT Act and laws, intermediaries are obliged to share user data in specific criminal cases. The government has no interest otherwise in user data. In one word, it is poppycock,” the official added.
According to The Washington Post article, Zatko’s complaint claimed that Twitter is a “chaotic and rudderless company beset by infighting” and unable to protect its users numbering 238 million a day.
Other allegations made in the complaint are that Twitter had violated a settlement reached with the FTC 11 years ago “by falsely claiming that it had a solid security plan” when it did not, and that Twitter “prioritised user growth over reducing spam…executives stood to win individual bonuses of as much as $10 million tied to increases in daily users, and nothing explicitly for cutting spam”.
(Edited by Nida Fatima Siddiqui)
Also read: I took a 30-day social media detox. Here’s how it helped me