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Comment by bequanna | Hacker News Reader

This seems like a huge win for the defense in a case using DMs or Tweets as evidence.

It would be quite easy to argue that a highly-politicized org like Twitter _might_ alter tweets or DMs to implicate someone in the opposing party. That’s reasonable doubt that at least some jurors would buy.

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Usually these sorts of systems have very detailed logs and those logs are kept for a long time for things like lawsuits. In the hypothetical scenario you're describing the other party would subpoena Twitter and they would corroborate whether or not someone logged as that user or not.

From what the article mentions it sounds like Twitter could very well be lacking those detailed logs and checks...

But part of what this article calls out from the whistleblower's POV is that the logging and auditing systems that would be needed to do that don't exist at Twitter. That users can activate God Mode or get into production systems without any logging or accountability

Perfidy could still happen in a tightly controlled system, where only a small number of people could view or modify user data, in a way that requires multiple individuals to sign off on it, and both the access and the modifications were internally logged and audited.

But that turns into "there was a sizeable conspiracy to fabricate evidence", as opposed to "a random person out of 2000 got bored, had a grudge, decided to have a laugh, and was acting alone".

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