In a statement, the micro-blogging platform denied claims made by conservative activist group Project Veritas that employees from the company monitor private user data. (File Photo)
Twitter has denied claims that its employees are monitoring Direct Messages (DM) exchanged among its over 300 million users on its platform. In a statement, the micro-blogging platform denied claims made by conservative activist group Project Veritas that employees from the company monitor private user data, TechCrunch reported on Wednesday.
“We do not proactively review DMs. Period. A limited number of employees have access to such information, for legitimate work purposes, and we enforce strict access protocols for those employees,” Twitter said in the statement. Project Veritas, in video footage, had claimed that Twitter employees look at users’ DMs.
A video shows current and former Twitter employees explaining ‘shadowbans,’ a practice by which Twitter will make it more difficult to find and view a user’s tweets. In one of the videos, ‘engineers from the company seemed to say that Twitter can hand over President Donald Trump’s data, including deleted tweets and direct messages, to the Department of Justice,’ the report said, citing Project Veritas. In response, Twitter has said that without valid legal requests, it does not disclose any such information.
Twitter later issued a statement, saying employees shown in the video ‘were speaking in a personal capacity and do not represent or speak for Twitter’. According to TechCrunch, Project Veritas is known for its deceitful methods to expose biases among media organisations. The group had earlier held the Washington Post accountable for running a fake news story on Roy Moore, in the immediate aftermath of sexual assault accusations.