Twitter Is Under a Strict Consent Decree with the FTC | Hacker News Reader

Twitter Is Under a Strict Consent Decree with the FTC

techdirt.com

51 pointselicash16 comments

I can't help but be reminded of Harry Potter whenever I hear Decree.

"The Decree for the Reasonable Restriction of Underage Sorcery is a law that limits the magic that underage wizards are allowed to use". - Dolores Umbridge

It's fascinating to watch all of the powers that be fighting this ownership change so hard. I wonder why they found control of Twitter so important..?

How is this "fighting this ownership change" if Twitter has been under this consent decree for over a decade?

I was referring to this being made into some huge news story, when literally nothing changed. Why were we not blasted with scary missives about this consent decree 2 months ago or 2 years ago?

There are people trying to flood the internet with non-stop negative Twitter stories, which is the part I find fascinating. I don't find the consent decree to be fascinating at all. It will be interesting to see how selective enforcement is though.

The Elon-Twitter saga is fascinating in quasi r/ABoringDystopia meets, well, Twitter sort of way.

The stage is set with a billionaire doubling down on a meme and then stumbling into an absurd $45B baby trap. The Internet loves watching a fool and their money parted; Twitter definitely loves watching a fool and their money parted.

And then, for some, it’s dawning that Musk has been on this MAGA-infused, grade-school-interpretation-of-free-speech trajectory and the stakes of this Twitter acquisition are suddenly much higher. Doubly so when you review the behind the scenes discussions [1] and believe Musk is completely disingenuous (any guess who “the boss himself” is?) in his desire for a neutral platform[2].

I’ve been doom-scrolling the Elon-Twitter news mostly for the rapid unravelling of Musk’s ur-engineer persona. His engineering management has been a cavalcade of bully choices: shitcan half the company, stack rank your engineers by LOC, enforce work-the-weekend death marches, and throw all your coders on to a manager schedule...in an office...in 2022.

Maybe my opinion will change when I start hearing stories about the first of his Twitter pull requests, but right now he’s looking like a dilettante who meme'd into a shit show and has forgotten his ambitions to make us a multi-planet species.

[1] https://danluu.com/elon-twitter-texts/#22 [2] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1589639376186724354

Because the people who were in charge two months/years ago understood the consent decree, were afraid of the FTC, had the manpower to actually obey it without having software engineers to self-certify with possible legal repercussions to themselves. The new guy doesn't give a shit about the consent decree, the FTC, or his employees' exposure. He also released a new feature without going through rigorous safety and compliance review, exactly the thing the consent degree mandates. If that's "nothing has changed", I'd hate to see what your busy weeks look like.

Probably this

> In a note posted to Twitter’s Slack and viewable to all staff that was obtained by The Verge, an attorney on the company’s privacy team wrote, “Elon has shown that his only priority with Twitter users is how to monetize them. I do not believe he cares about the human rights activists. the dissidents, our users in un-monetizable regions, and all the other users who have made Twitter the global town square you have all spent so long building, and we all love.”

Twitter became a de facto official communication channel for many organizations and politicians. Despite all his flaws Trump showed how important Twitter was to political discourse. I'm hopeful that the move to the Fediverse / Mastodon will allow organizations to maintain official discourse, but using their own server instances, such that they're not beholden to the whims and changing owners of a VC funded corporation, who apparently stopped caring about FTC decrees.

But wait, when people said they shouldn't censor unpopular or non-mainstream speech due to them being "a global town square", they protested that they were simply a website and people were free to make their own Twitter.

What happened to that? Now all of a sudden it matters that all voices be heard?

The FTC decree isn't related to free speech. It was a part of a settlement the FTC reached with Twitter regarding their mishandling of customer data[1].

The original article is anticipating a messy collision Twitter's legal obligations to the FTC and Musk's inscrutable product development roadmap given the recent employee churn (both layoffs and exits from key roles, e.g. CISO, CPO, & CCO.)

[1] https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2011/03/...

   anticipating a messy collision

Ah yes, the backbone of current day journalism.

In contrast to what, the impartial journalism of the past[1]? It doesn't serve well to surrender your worldview to the journalistic authority over truth any more today than it did then.

But now, articles like the TechDirt post are extremely verifiable (admittedly, the "anticipating a messy collision" is my own editorializing.) Don't believe Twitter is under a consent order? Go read it[2]. Don't believe their CSIO quit? Go look at their LinkedIn profile[3]

But I suspect your issue is not with the facts of the article, but the motivation behind making this /news/. I'd argue it absolutely is news regardless of the circus surrounding surrounding the acquisition especially if you care about consumer privacy. You can go read the 2011 complaint[4]; TLDR Twitter was super cavalier with non-public consumer data and the FTC was, "Clean this shit up and put a process in place so it doesn't happen again." And it did happen again! This year Twitter paid $150M for using 2FA numbers for ad targeting[5].

So you now have to think: is Musk going to make consumer privacy a priority? Maybe these exoduses are a good thing? Clean house and all. Or maybe he still coming up with a plan while courting advertisers[6] and scrambling for recurring revenue? But that comes back to the original question: even if Musk gave a shit, does Twitter retain the organizational capacity to police itself?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism [2] https://www.ftc.gov/sites/default/files/documents/cases/2010... [3] https://www.linkedin.com/in/lea-kissner/ [4] https://www.ftc.gov/sites/default/files/documents/cases/2011... [5] https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog/2022/05/twitter-p... [6] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1585619322239561728

The FTC has, historically, been one of the more spineless agencies in the US. Elon has nothing to fear that a few lawyers can’t fix.

And calling Twitter a ‘town hall that we love’ shows the bias of the article and the source. Twitter has been a one-sided political propaganda and censorship machine for many many years.

I have to imagine Facebook and Uber had a few lawyers and one paid $4.9B in fines and the other's former-CSO is now awaiting sentencing on an obstruction of justice conviction.

The interesting proposition here is that Twitter could have lost the organizational capacity to comply with these consent decrees, or at least abdicated the responsibility to the engineers...which sounds bananas.

The Prequel-meme writes itself...

    ELON-AKIN: I'm not worried about the FTC. I build rockets.
    PADME-GNINEER: Then I shouldn't be either.
    ELON-AKIN: ...
    PADME-GNINEER: I shouldn't be either, right?

Trying to pass the compliance risk on to the engineers is insane. And I don't think the FTC buys it. It's a long shot because the ultra wealthy rarely have to face real consequences in America, but there's a real possibility that Elon Musk goes to prison over his flippant disregard of the FTC.

> The interesting proposition here is that Twitter could have lost the organizational capacity to comply with these consent decrees

Since Musk has taken over (2 weeks) they have, unless I misunderstand something, lost the head of trust and safety twice: the first fired for being part of the team that held Musk to his cobtract, the second resigning today.

I love the smell of peak HN in the morning. Smells like denial.

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