India forced Twitter to put agent on payroll, whistleblower says | Hacker News Reader

India forced Twitter to put agent on payroll, whistleblower says

reuters.com

210 pointsperihelions46 comments

I think this is related to IT rules India enforced in 2021. More context here. https://techcrunch.com/2021/08/10/twitter-now-in-compliance-...

Indian govt was not happy with the criticism it received on twitter about it's handling of COVID and even forced twitter to delete some tweets. Even tweets asking for help during oxygen crisis were deleted. Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-56883483

WhatsApp of all companies put up quite a fight against Indian Govt demand to monitor the messages, although I'm not sure what became of it. Source 1: https://www.forbes.com/sites/aayushipratap/2021/06/15/whatsa... Source 2: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/25/technology/whatsapp-india....

Why would the Indian Govt need to place a spy in Twitter in order to find things it wants censored?

It's more likely that this person was able to spy on Twitter users' communications, not only in India but all over the world (if we're to believe how bad Twitter's database security policies were)

Gotta get those DMs.

When I was on social media, Twitter was pretty much the only mainstream social media which had a sizable anti-rightwing userbase. Could be bacause of that?

Do you have any statistics showing that?

Another valuable aspect to the Indian government could have been the chance of getting to the real identities of the "troublesome people" via IP/mobile 2FA phone number records.

This seems like the most likely reason. So they can jail people with anonymous accounts.

> Why would the Indian Govt need to place a spy in Twitter in order to find things it wants censored?

It’s more about targeting the person as an example, so others won’t dare say anything against the government.

Spot on.

This is what became of it -

"In the largest FDI in the Indian technology sector, US Internet giant Facebook will be buying 9.99% stake in Reliance Industries Ltd’s digital unit Jio Platforms Ltd, for $5.7 billion"

https://indianexpress.com/article/business/companies/relianc...

Seems like India wasn't the only country attempting this:

"The governments of India, Nigeria, [redacted] and Russia sought, with varying success, to force Twitter to hire local FTEs that could be used as leverage."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2022/t...

hiring local FTEs is different from hiring an 'agent'

Even if the candidate is provided by the government?

There's a great deal of difference between "You must hire from this government-operated job training program" and "You must hire this person. No, really, this guy."

In any case, this is irrelevant. The linked document says that Russia, Nigeria, India + one redacted government sought to force Twitter to hire local FTEs "that could be used as leverage", no mention of providing candidates or anything. It looks less like trying to embed agents in Twitter and more like wanting Twitter employees they could pressure, arrest, and punish without causing a diplomatic clusterfuck. India jailing an American citizen forces the US government to intervene, and said US citizen would've fled the country long before things got that tense anyway. A citizen of their own country, on the other hand, can be much more easily contained, and when push comes to shove, the US won't do much for a foreign national who only happens to work for Twitter.

I've always wondered why, exactly, a handful of companies like Twitter, Facebook and Google somehow dominate the internet in spite of a nearly nonexistent cost of entry into the internet and the fact that they, themselves, don't really do much - definitely not something somebody else couldn't easily do. This plays into my conspiracy theory thinking that they're so dominant because they've been propped up by entrenched government interests as long as they pay back the favors when the favors come due.

The Indian government is weirdly protectionist about technology companies operating inside its borders. I remember stories of people from trading firms having to carry servers they personally owned across the border in order to deploy them to trade stock, and also having to completely disclose trading algorithms to the Indian regulators.

It is probably one of the most difficult things to prove given the secrecy of such arrangements, but I have to assume that in order for many of these services to operate in countries, governments require concessions be they data sharing or placement of their people in operations like this. The US is no exception. https://www.mintpressnews.com/twitter-hiring-alarming-number...

Meanwhile Twitter seemingly voluntarily put a British psyops officer in charge of the Middle East [1]. And for all their hand-wringing about state-backed social media disinformation campaigns, no western mainstream media have reported on this - not Reuters, not the BBC, not the NY Times, not CNN, not Fox News, not the Guardian.

[1] https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/twitter-executive-also-pa...

Imagine if it was an IRGC officer in charge of America at Twitter.

Lol at the hypocrisy of ‘free and fair’ media.. hard to digest this but Trump was actually right about the media. If there was ever any doubt in anybody’s mind that social media tech companies are an extension of Americas gov and policy circles, this should put that to rest.

Many more people are more right about the media. Trump's critiques are ham-fisted imitations of more substantial ones.

Why would this be reported? What's the story?

Are you claiming that all media organizations are conspiring together to hide this information? What if they have no reason to report on it?

There's no government it the world that doesn't do this. If you are a multi-national corporation, you deal with it.

That is quite a sweeping and bold statement that I would like to form my own opinion about. Do you have any links to reading material ?

Just to be clear I am not disagreeing or agreeing with you yet.

Snowden revelations: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-i...

That's only one governments actions, the poster stated all governments.

It's not just one gov't, it's Five Eyes. I guess if you're uncomfortable extrapolating from there, that's your business.

I am also shocked at such allegation. Intelligence agencies are usually quite transparent about the deployment and identities of their agents. If someone can't prove it, there is no reason to think governments would do such a thing. They exist to protect us and uphold values of free speech.

Seriously though, information gathering and manipulation are some of their main duties. Any intelligence agency would be negligent if it was not trying to infiltrate centralized social media companies.

You have a very legit point, in fact I mentioned that I don't agree or disagree with PP yet. With open source intelligence sourcing being as active as they are, was wondering if this phenomenon has been studied and or reported. I will not be surprised if the allegations are true, perhaps with a less sweeping scope, not that it makes it anymore palatable. The world seems to be being eaten piecemeal by populist authoritarianism.

We live in a world where the powerful have very good privacy and security and the masses have high transparency. It should be the other way around. While we are in this state, we can generally only theorize about what is happening at high levels. We see a few leaks from time to time.

There is no government in the world that doesn't force Twitter to put their agents on payroll?

Obviously but this story is about the Indian government doing that and providing details of such. Hopefully twitter can learn from such espionage and better silo off departments from people. Some tech companies have almost no walls between getting user information and the average employee.

So the insider threat team was run out of the recruiting office?

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