Elon Musk went on Tucker Carlson this week and spewed some utter nonsense, claiming that one thing he discovered upon taking over Twitter was that federal agencies had full access to everything at Twitter, including DMs.
“The degree to which various government agencies effectively had full access to everything that was going on at Twitter blew my mind,” Musk says in video posted ahead of the Monday night interview. “I was not aware of that,” Musk adds, claiming that his predecessors even allowed those agencies access to infiltrate users’ direct messages.
From everything that’s been discussed so far, and the way that the old Twitter regime handled requests for information from Twitter (i.e., repeatedly fighting the government in court when it requested DM info, and that includes when Democrats on the January 6th Committee subpoenaed info) this sounded highly unlikely to be true. Given how frequently Twitter was seen directly and publicly challenging demands for information, and revealing how often it rejected government requests for information in its transparency reports (that Elon no longer issues), this whole claim seemed highly questionable.
Certainly, none of the Twitter Files revealed anything like this.
Given the bizarre claim, I reached out to three separate former Twitter employees who would be in positions to know how the company handled federal government requests for information. Two out of the three actually started off their responses with swear words out of anger that Elon is flat out making shit up. All insisted he’s absolutely, categorically wrong about this claim.
From one:
This is completely false. Pre-Elon Twitter worked tirelessly to protect users from overreaching government requests for information. The idea that Twitter was somehow fighting the US government in courts, while giving the US government access to DMs, is simply absurd. Moreover, it’s dangerous rhetoric.
Another former exec called it a “shocking lie” and noted:
DMs were exceedingly locked down. The FBI needed a search warrant to get that kind of content…. There were tools in place to be able to respond to valid legal process – but [it] would go through EXTREME scrutiny.
The third also noted that DMs were “specially locked down” and also pointed out that the company had made specific promises to the FTC regarding who had access to DMs (remember the consent decrees?) and that execs at the company knew full well that lying to the FTC would be very, very bad.
Of course, I would surmise that the company’s executives used to know that. I doubt it’s true today. However, given Elon is making those claims publicly, I’m guessing the FTC may be sending over more requests for information.
Honestly, this seems like typical Elon, where he makes claims based on what he thinks his audience wants to hear rather than anything connected to reality. As per usual, he’s playing to the Fox News audience (he did the same thing when he did his BBC interview last week). But as some of the people quoted above note, this is not just absolute bullshit, it’s a dangerous lie that implies things about the former management team that are simply not true.
If confronted on this, I’m sure he’d claim that he meant the kind of access they got through valid legal process, which is not even remotely “full access to everything that was going on at Twitter.” Alternatively, as one person I spoke to noted, there’s a reading of this (that I’m sure Elon didn’t mean) that what actually blew his mind was that the government did not, in fact, have full access to everything. But there’s no way that’s actually what he meant.
Instead, he’s just making shit up without realizing the consequences. Because he’ll never face them. He never does.
Now, after that clip, he does talk about encrypting DMs, which he’s been promising for a while, and which we applauded. Because it would be a big and important step. But it’s also incredibly difficult to do well, and easy to screw up. And given how things have been working at Twitter lately, I wouldn’t trust the DM encryption until it’s been audited. So, really, a lot of this seems to be Elon’s warped understanding of why he needed to encrypt DMs. Doing so definitely makes it much more difficult for government to ever get access to anyone’s DMs, but that doesn’t mean that “various government agencies” had “full access” to people’s DMs. That’s just utter bullshit.
