35 ms·

Mudge Twitter whistleblower testimony [video]

156 points by campuscodi 4y ago

zamalek 4y ago
Society is becoming a parody if itself. I understand that there are consequences of Mudge's information but, from a purely naive standpoint, having congress get involved over bots on a social network where people share 280 character messages is fucking bizarre.
- capableweb 4y ago
  It's not about "bots on a social network", it's about misuse of peoples data in one of the worlds biggest social network. Just as I tuned in, Mudge was talking about how Twitter repeatedly mismanaged peoples emails, citing that if they didn't sell emails, their competitors would get an unfair advantage.
- zhxshen 4y ago
  Are you even watching this? They're talking about foreign agents running amok on the inside (even after Twitter being notified by the FBI), lack of logging, mishandling of email addresses, etc, etc. Bots or no bots, all of that stuff is kind of a big deal.
  - encryptluks2 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - colinmhayes 4y ago
      It's really not hard to find evidence of twitter security fuck ups. Multiple Saudi nationals have given up dissident information to the saudi government because of their access to twitter's internal geolocation tools. One of them fled the country after twitter told him the FBI was investigating him. Twitter practically forced everyone to give them their phone number and then leaked the numbers. The list goes on.
      - encryptluks2 4y ago
        Are you kidding me? The major credit bureaus have had just as many fuck ups. You don't see congress doing anything to fix it. There was a major utility shutdown due to security issues where they paid a ransom. Did you see Congress doing anything? This isn't exclusive to Twitter. Congress will use any situation to push their opportunistic rhetoric, and for them Twitter a social media company is more important to spread their propaganda than a credit bureau breach where everyone's personal data is compromised. What values does that show and teach, and why is that your talking point?
        aaaaaaaaata 4y ago
        Who are you arguing for, and why?
        encryptluks2 4y ago
        I'm arguing for the people, who are you arguing for?
        aaaaaaaaata 4y ago
        > and why Anyway. I feel I'm doing the same by promoting responsible disclosure of unethical treatment of people's data. Did you even look at the guy's frigging Wikipedia page yet?! I just feel like we're talking past each other. Reading through rest of thread...Is this a Musk-related thing for you?
        encryptluks2 4y ago
        > Did you even look at the guy's frigging Wikipedia page yet?! Of course, but a Wikipedia page is not immune from bias nor does it provide unfettered credibility. I recall the same tactics and approaches being utilized in users pushing an agenda for Wikileaks, suggesting that they were basically perfect and incapable of doing any wrong and that Assange could do no harm. I don't give anyone a God-like status. > Reading through rest of thread...Is this a Musk-related thing for you? No, this is a personal experience kind of thing. I see this type of situation quite often where a topic will get people are riled up based on their political and personal biases and skew their critical-thinking ability to actually analyze the situation. If congress was actually concerned about people's data, they would have actually put forth efforts to enact some reasonable legislation that didn't just apply to whatever platform they feel the most censored on.
    - zhxshen 4y ago
      Mudge isn't a politician, has an excellent reputation, and would probably be much happier if Twitter just had its shit together in the first place so he doesn't have to kick-off a whistlestop tour on the subpoena train. First stop: getting grilled for 2h40m by geriatric attorneys & faded beauty queens. In other words, I see no reason for him to lie about any of this.
      - encryptluks2 4y ago
        zhxshen 4y ago
        Comparing Mudge to a cop... Just Say No. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peiter_Zatko https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peiter_Zatko
        encryptluks2 4y ago
        Again, many similar people can build a positive public reputation but that doesn't mean they are immune from criticism or bad decision-making later in life. Epstein had a good reputation at one point. Larry Nasar had a good reputation at one point. Doesn't prevent people from doing bad things to further their own self-interests.
        aaaaaaaaata 4y ago
        > Epstein had a good reputation at one point. With you? He never did with me.
        encryptluks2 4y ago
        By former Presidents, CEOs, Prince's, etc. Glad you never got too close to him as there is no telling what kind of situation you'd end up in.
      - sangnoir 4y ago
  - AnimalMuppet 4y ago
    Given Twitter's centrality in the flow of information, it would be unreasonable to not expect foreign agents (along with extremists of every flavor, financial fraud artists, and who knows what else) to try to get inside. The same is true of Facebook and Google.
    - zhxshen 4y ago
      Foreign agents run amok before an FBI warning: sure, shit happens. Foreign agents still running amok after an FBI warning: WTF?!
      - aaaaaaaaata 4y ago
        I'm not sure SoftBank/KSA is super concerned about "foreign agents" inside their company.
        zhxshen 4y ago
        apparently so
- ryzvonusef 4y ago
  https://twitter.com/donie/status/1569695781631688704 https://twitter.com/donie/status/1569695781631688704 > "It's not far fetched to say an employee inside the company could take over the accounts of all the Senators in this room," @dotMudge with a warning here on Captiol Hill. #Twitter perhaps a valid reason?
  - codyb 4y ago
    They probably have a way to take over accounts to check bug reports. We've had that at places I've worked. Where you'd be able to impersonate a user in order to see what was going on with their specific set of user data to corroborate their report and find a fix. The question is... are the permissions locked down, is access audited and immutable, etc I think.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      Yep, there's lots of software with "su for X" capabilities; it's much better than the normal method which is "ok tell me your password and I'll login as you and see what's up".
  - AndrewStephens 4y ago
    Well Duh! Of course a twitter employee could take over any account. Hopefully they have some internal safeguards in place but there are probably hundreds of people there that could take over an account if they wanted to, just as the owners of news.ycombinator.com could take over any account here. You don't really own a Twitter (or Facebook, or ycombinator) account. Those services have an account on you. You update their account on you when you use their service to post (and they keep other information useful to their business on your account that you have no access to). This is just the way social media works.
    - michaelt 4y ago
      > Well Duh! Of course a twitter employee could take over any account. Most companies the size of Twitter would have a lot more controls than that on random employees' write access to production. If I want to assume a user's identity in my employer's production system I have to fill out a form justifying it, get my manager's approval for each account accessed, and my activity is subject to logging.
- PKop 4y ago
  If you pretend a platform for mass media, journalism, and public discourse that certainly affects domestic and international politics is trivial, sure. Just people huh? Not the Presidents, politicians, richest business men and high profile journalists right? To say nothing of all the other niche communities like finance and tech.
- SanjayMehta 4y ago
  Twitter is a propaganda network; whoever controls it, controls the narrative.
  - nkozyra 4y ago
    How is that different than literally every other website or publication on earth?
    - illuminerdy 4y ago
      I think the scope and scale makes it different. Social media has become extremely important to the free and open exchange of ideas between people.
      - deltree7 4y ago
        Sinclair broadcasting has a far broader reach and actually influences ideologies that you can draw a direct correlation to ideology and Sinclair broadcast viewers. None of Twitter/FB/Youtube has that kind of correlation
      - nkozyra 4y ago
        > I think the scope and scale makes it different. Then what is the threshold wherein the natural inability to avoid bias becomes propaganda? Why is Twitter propaganda but not HN or my blog? When does it cross the line?
        hackerlight 4y ago
        This is the binary bias[1]. You're trying to come up with hard distinctions and categories, when trying to do so is totally uninteresting and without any utility. I notice it's extremely common here on HN[2], perhaps because the job of an engineer involves working with categories, and something that's linguistically fuzzy is uncomfortable to them. I write more about this cognitive failing in the second half of my post here[3]. In short, there is no objective threshold wherein the natural inability to avoid bias becomes propaganda. And nor should we waste time on that point. Such a discussion is merely semantics around the definition of the word "propaganda". We should leave that to the people who compile dictionaries. Such clouded thinking has created a blind spot here in this very thread, e.g. that someone can say something so ridiculous as "How is that different than literally every other website or publication on earth?" and not get downvoted, as if the practical difference between a social media platform with access to hundreds of millions of eyeballs on the one hand, and a small blog on the other, is not self-evident. Such an obvious difference can only not be self-evident to someone who is incapable of understanding that things can vary by degree instead of by category. [1] https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/binary-bias-distorts-how-we-integrate-information.html https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/binary-bi... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32708833 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32708833 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32674580 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32674580
- sc68cal 4y ago
  This is all being done so that Elon Musk can back out of his contract to buy Twitter
  - smt88 4y ago
    I hate Musk, but who cares what the motivation is? Shedding light on an (unfortunately very) influential company is good for the public. Musk shouldn't get out of his deal, but whatever he does to reveal malpractice at Twitter is good for all of us.
    - aaaaaaaaata 4y ago
      Or any/all large corps that hold extortion-level userdata on everybody, statistically speaking.
- marcinzm 4y ago
  I'd hope congress pays some attention to anything which 80 million Americans use or interact with.
- esperent 4y ago
  > on a social network where people share 280 character messages is fucking bizarre. reply Perhaps a less dismissive characterization of Twitter would help make it less bizarre? It's a platform used by many leading public figures, including US presidents, to share information and the 280 character limit is a format that often leads to less filtered communication than you'd get in other mediums.
- TheRealDunkirk 4y ago
  I think you're missing the point entirely. The fact that the world has gone bonkers over this whole farce proves that Twitter is just as influential as the most jaded critic has suspected. And then you stop and realize that the user numbers on Twitter are DWARFED by Facebook (and Instagram and TikTok), and you realize just how screwed we really are. And all for the sake of making some people insanely rich, by flooding every aspect of our lives with advertising.
- RunSet 4y ago
  https://www.forbes.com/sites/augustinefou/2021/06/07/the-curious-case-of-rebekah-jones-suspension-from-twitter/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/augustinefou/2021/06/07/the-cur...
- thelock85 4y ago
  > Society is becoming a parody of itself. We've accepted emotional, mental, spiritual, and physical (to some extent) abstractions of ourselves as our true selves. And exchanged social cues for algorithms to manipulate our behaviors. In the moments when you can break out of that abstraction the parody becomes so clear, and also terrifying. Like what are we actually building towards?
- faeriechangling 4y ago
  I’ve been hearing people downplay the seriousness of things on the internet my entire life and I’m mostly surprised at this point that people think that taking twitter seriously is such a ridiculous notion. If you instead say “international information system responsible for sending 500m messages daily including by senior govt/business officials has poor stewardship” I think it doesn’t seem so rediculous that senior government officials are so concerned. They all use Twitter, why wouldn’t they be concerned? You could easily cause militarily significant damage to a country with a good hack against twitter. There was a very politically significant insurrection organized on twitter, this system has already been used to direct an angry mob in the general direction of these high level government officials who proceeded to attempt to break down barricades and assault them.
zhxshen 4y ago
Feeling like Twitter is just about to ruin the low-regulation party for everybody. Could be wrong though. Not much happened after the Experian breach after all.
- capableweb 4y ago
  > Feeling like Twitter is just about to ruin the low-regulation party for everybody. Alternative take: Lawmakers are finally waking up and realizing how much these platforms can affect our daily lives, mostly because most common folk are signed up and use these platforms, and are starting to figure out how we can limit the damage for when things go wrong.
  - dantheman 4y ago
    What damage?
    - nathancahill 4y ago
      And even further.. what wrong?
    - ElevenLathe 4y ago
    - PuppyTailWags 4y ago
      I think Twitter(and other social media) genuinely makes people's mental health worse. We have coined terms like "doomscrolling" and have studies to evidence that Instagram has a negative effect on the psychological wellbeing of teenage girls. I think that this can arguably fall into the category of "damage".
    - shadowgovt 4y ago
      In Twitter's case, for starters, the time they heavily incentivized sharing phone numbers with them and then used that information to accidentally build an open phone number harvester. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/02/how-twitters-default-settings-can-leak-your-phone-number https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/02/how-twitters-default-s...
seafoam 4y ago
mudge just testified in response to a Senator's question that Twitter does not have a test env
- bombcar 4y ago
  This is clearly perjury, you can find it at www.twitter.com /s
- bushbaba 4y ago
  To be fair. Many companies staging is unusable with testing in prod.
  - nrmitchi 4y ago
    If I recall correctly, Uber literally did an entire post series about how they do all testing in production using feature flags and request routing, because it was "technically infeasible" at their scale to do anything differently.
    - m00x 4y ago
      Uber really isn't a great company to aspire to when it comes to tech. They have a similar mentality to Facebook of: "Spend more time getting it done than planning it out".
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- smt88 4y ago
  What does that mean though? Twitter must have test environments for developers and automatic tests. Do they just not have a full staging environment? That would be understandable. It's impossible to create a production-like test environment for a product like Twitter. You're better off just doing canary releases or feature flags with slow rollouts.
  - michaelt 4y ago
encryptluks2 4y ago
Please be on the lookout for grandstanding and do your own diligence in actually understanding the issues
- freebreakfast 4y ago
  I agree. Read about Mudge's history. When you understand Mudge, then you'll understand why this is not grandstanding on his part. You'll understand why he's not doing this support Musk, for money, to get back at Twitter, or any of that. You'll understand he's doing this because he cares very deeply about information security.
highwaylights 4y ago
Two big things about this that really grate me: 1) After Snowden, after Experian, after Pegasus, after decades of screaming about these issues and getting shushed and laughed at - that lefties might take over your twitter account is the straw that’ll break the camel’s back? Are you freaking kidding me? 2) Elon is going to get away with it. And he really shouldn’t - he already waived his right to back out based on any of this. Just because you like someone shouldn’t make them above the law, and basically the takeaway here will be that like Trump he’s above the law because a large enough section of the public likes him. Setting all of this aside, maybe it’s worth actually trying to do something about the real problem - that too many members of society (including the leaders) are dangerously under-informed for living in it, let alone governing. None of this should be news to anyone here.
- TheRealDunkirk 4y ago
  > that too many members of society (including the leaders) are dangerously under-informed for living in it, let alone governing And this might even be tenable, if they were to surround themselves with knowledgable people who could give them advice. But, in a situation not entirely dissimilar to the inner workings of large corporations, our leaders are surrounded by parasites who ride on the their backs, and lead them into making decisions that benefit themselves in the short term, instead of benefitting the country (or the company) in the long run. You can fix this in government by amending the Constitution to get rid of Citizens United ruling, and then tackling the lobbyist problem, as if either one were possible. And I don't know how you'd even begin to fix it in large corporations.
- anonymouse008 4y ago
  > 2) Elon is going to get away with it. And he really shouldn’t - he already waived his right to back out based on any of this. Just because you like someone shouldn’t make them above the law, and basically the takeaway here will be that like Trump he’s above the law because a large enough section of the public likes him. There’s no getting away with it. This was one hundred percent his plan the whole time - throw Twitter into chaos internally. Now for what reasons remain to be seen, but his extensive use of Twitter was highly unusual as a high profile CEO basically rewriting the PR game (which the SEC tried to reign in). That experience gives him unique insight into how Twitter works and what power it holds - he may very well feel a government party is influencing the platform too much and he’d rather destroy Twitter than lose control of it.
nrmitchi 4y ago
This entire thing is so bizarre to me. There is a room full of non-technical senators effectively testifying the unproven and one-sided statements of a single person (Zatko), who was let go from Twitter, with no ability for Twitter (or anyone at the company) to defend themselves or refute these statements.
- zitterbewegung 4y ago
  What you say is untrue. Bloomberg: Grassley says Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal declined an invitation to appear today. Kurt Wagner Tech Reporter
  - pclmulqdq 4y ago
    For good reason. Usually, these whistleblower sessions are used as a place to get sound bites for campaigning and give the CEO a tongue lashing. Due to the pending acquisition, this one has stakes that are about 100x higher than the typical whistleblower session. If Parag Agrawal screws up at this hearing, it could literally cost him billions of dollars. Let's be real: Twitter is a huge cesspool of harassment, hosts a ton of pornography (including from children), and clearly has monetization/business problems. It also seems to have much worse engineering than other social businesses. It's going to be a lot harder to defend in one of these sessions than Facebook.
    - mschuster91 4y ago
      > Let's be real: Twitter is a huge cesspool of harassment, hosts a ton of pornography (including from children) For the porn: So do Reddit and Facebook, with the latter having had multiple lawsuits by former content moderators for the uncountable amount of CSAM and gore [1]. The first "most popular" subreddit was r/NSFW, followed by r/gonewild - Reddit literally got big with porn. As for harassment: Facebook with its closed groups is just as bad if not worse for radicalization (simply because way more people use it and no one monitors these groups, not to mention open channels such as newspaper comment sections), with direct links to deadly unrest such as in India [2]. Meta's other products are a horror show in themselves - Whatsapp has a history with mobs riled up by fake news to the point these have their own Wikipedia listicle [3] and Instagram has been under fire for years in helping to aid eating disorders [4]. It's bad enough that there are so many bad actors on Twitter, but the simple fact that Facebook makes billions of dollars in profit each year and doesn't even come close to the amount of moderation they would need makes them even worse. [1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/a35xk5/facebook-moderators-are-suing-for-trauma-ptsd https://www.vice.com/en/article/a35xk5/facebook-moderators-a... [2] https://www.dw.com/en/india-facebook-under-the-microscope-over-ignoring-hate-speech/a-59610062 https://www.dw.com/en/india-facebook-under-the-microscope-ov... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_WhatsApp_lynchings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_WhatsApp_lynchings [4] https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/News/instagram-eating-disorders-depression-young-girls-lawsuits-claim/story?id=87418473 https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/News/instagram-eating-disorders-d...
sbf501 4y ago
i forgot what side of this issue i'm on.
- uwuemu 4y ago
  the only reasonable response in this thread... then again I stopped reading it after I got to the "Elon's going to get away with it" part
- thatguy0900 4y ago
  Do you want a openly malicious company or a inept/secretly malicious regulatory body
  - sbf501 4y ago
    - scifibestfi 4y ago
      How about we focus on zero people in poverty? You know, focus on raising people up instead of focusing on tearing people down. A growth mindset is more productive than a scarcity, zero sum mindset.
      - guelo 4y ago
        Money=power, including political power. Politically active billionaires violate the one-man-one-vote principle, especially after the supreme court ruled that money=speech in Citizen United.
        LawTalkingGuy 4y ago
        Is this going to be the "interstate commerce clause" for the left, by which absolute interference is justified because everything, even non-commercial private actions, are interstate at some point, or displace something which might have been interstate. Because nobody is ever exactly "equal" to someone else, in ability, resources, etc, nobody but the most victimized person can actually vote. By this logic any difference in equity absolutely demolishes the concept of democracy thus before the people can be trusted with any input they must all be "equalized" and placed into an economic system that keeps them that way. And before then, any inequality or privilege discovered or invented can be used to entirely negate a person's opinion. That's the only way you can have it. Either billionaires have the same rights we have, and more resources, or we've all got a boot on our necks that takes away anyone's freedoms whenever they become inconvenient for the state.
an1sotropy 4y ago
In response to Sen Grassley wrapping up questions about how Twitter executives wanted to address employee concerns about accepting ad money from Chinese companies, possibly with Chinese govt links (even while Twitter is banned in China): 28:25 [Mudge] "We're already in bed, it would be problematic if we lost that revenue stream, so figure out a way to make people comfortable with it." That isn't really surprising, but it's still bad. It's also worrying that some Americans complain about "big [US] government" to justify the very limited size and power of the FTC to regulate US big tech, while somehow overlooking the threat from the big Chinese government, its awful human rights record, and its track record of working to gain access into US companies. It's really easy to criticize these senators for not being tech ignorant, but this is the only govt we have, and it's the only one that can empower the FTC to do more.
- schnable 4y ago
  > It's also worrying that some Americans complain about "big [US] government" to justify the very limited size and power of the FTC to regulate US big tech, while somehow overlooking the threat from the big Chinese government, its awful human rights record, and its track record of working to gain access into US companies. How is a bigger/more powerful FTC an antidote to the bad behavior of the Chinese government, or a defense against them?
  - ethanbond 4y ago
    Not that I necessarily believe in this, but you could imagine e.g. FTC or FCC requiring content-neutrality. In that world, China's asks for censorship go up against US's asks for no censorship. In this current world, China's asks for censorship go up against... employees' personal appetite for losing money (and potentially their jobs) in exchange for a non-China dominated information space?
  - codyb 4y ago
    Maybe they could enforce rules notifying users where their ads were coming from?
  - an1sotropy 4y ago
mjreacher 4y ago
On another thread that didn't receive the same attention as this one we learn the Twitter has Chinese and Indian government agents amongst their employees. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32825670 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32825670
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  And that execs simply don't care: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32832796 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32832796>
remarkEon 4y ago
Testimony actually starts at roughly 13:00 with an opening statement by Durbin.
cronix 4y ago
This is the part that I think leaves Twitter severely exposed, at least in the EU with GDPR (from my limited, basic understanding of GDPR). Twitter does not delete data when requested by users to delete their account. https://youtu.be/A0A-uOhMU1Y?t=7219 https://youtu.be/A0A-uOhMU1Y?t=7219
- m00x 4y ago
  We spent a lot of time on this when I was at Segment. It's incredibly hard for an evented system to go back through archives and delete every data from a user, but it's possible. It should be much easier for Twitter to do this, so there are no user merges (anonymous user becomes identified and merges), but I'm not sure about their data storage. This should have been done years ago.
etchalon 4y ago
Midge's point seems to be, "Twitter refused to spend the money, or change their processes, necessary to guarantee data authority, access and visibility." What till these Senators learn about basically every other business in America.
jti107 4y ago
sounds like security issues of a startup that quickly scaled and never dealt with the technical debt rather than anything malicious.
- lazide 4y ago
  At some point, not doing it - despite billions in revenue, and massive numbers of engineers - is indistinguishable from active maliciousness.
0x_rs 4y ago
From the video, funny bit at about 01:01:00: I'm reminded of one conversation with an executive, when I said I am confident we have a foreign agent, and their response was "well, since we already have one, what does it matter if we have more, let's keep growing the office"
8bitsrule 4y ago
After an hour of this hearing, the smell reminds me of Enron.
vinay_ys 4y ago
If twitter implemented the following, it would take much of the steam out of this case: 1. Restricted/conditional/temporary access to production systems with extensive centralised audit logging. 2. Handled phone# and geo-location data as sensitive personally identifiable information (SPII) – kept this data in one centralized place (a micro service with well-defined access controlled apis) and prevented its proliferation into other systems. And promptly deleted it when users deleted their accounts. To implement these two things, it wouldn't cost anywhere near $150M. And likely it wouldn't impact the velocity of their revenue features too much either (impact would be something like slow-down for quarter). Sad thing is senators are picking on only some companies and not others. Instead, they should be making a comprehensive data privacy act that applies to all companies – like credit card companies, shopping/loyalty-card companies, all the data brokers etc.
- spfzero 4y ago
  They're not picking on one company arbitrarily. There was a specific whistleblower complaint sent to the SEC, about Twitter. Twitter is a large company, and the SEC has to take notice by law. Twitter sticks up as it is such a large company with so many customers, the complaint is authoritative, and there was an agreement in 2011 with the government which the complaint argues has been broken by Twitter. That agreement implied that Twitter would do your 1. and 2., starting 11 years ago, and they seem to have not.
  - sangnoir 4y ago
    > SEC has to take notice by law. Senate =/= SEC
    - spfzero 4y ago
      Congress oversees the SEC.
      - sangnoir 4y ago
        Yet congress doesn't have hearings on every SEC investigation. GPs claim was congress would better spend its time writing industry-wide laws instead of this dog-and-pony show (my words). Parent refutation was that the SEC is obligated to look into every allegation - my observation was that congress doesn't have to micromanage SEC investigations. I support gp - congress should be legislating or involving the SEC officials to see where the gaps in the law are, rather than seeking soundbites.
mikewarot 4y ago
It's just jaw dropping how they thought nothing of externalizing the costs of every possible problem or technical debt in order to keep chasing the next bonus.
- aaaaaaaaata 4y ago
  We keep providing the incentives and being surprised.
kornhole 4y ago
Why shouldn't each politician set up her own Mastodon server moderated by her staffers? Then they would have complete control of data that they don't publish to the world. They also can't be cancelled, shadow banned, or censored by any company or government.

156 points by campuscodi 4y ago

Society is becoming a parody if itself. I understand that there are consequences of Mudge's information but, from a purely naive standpoint, having congress get involved over bots on a social network where people share 280 character messages is fucking bizarre.

capableweb 4y ago
It's not about "bots on a social network", it's about misuse of peoples data in one of the worlds biggest social network. Just as I tuned in, Mudge was talking about how Twitter repeatedly mismanaged peoples emails, citing that if they didn't sell emails, their competitors would get an unfair advantage.
zhxshen 4y ago
Are you even watching this? They're talking about foreign agents running amok on the inside (even after Twitter being notified by the FBI), lack of logging, mishandling of email addresses, etc, etc. Bots or no bots, all of that stuff is kind of a big deal.
- encryptluks2 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - colinmhayes 4y ago
    It's really not hard to find evidence of twitter security fuck ups. Multiple Saudi nationals have given up dissident information to the saudi government because of their access to twitter's internal geolocation tools. One of them fled the country after twitter told him the FBI was investigating him. Twitter practically forced everyone to give them their phone number and then leaked the numbers. The list goes on.
    - encryptluks2 4y ago
      Are you kidding me? The major credit bureaus have had just as many fuck ups. You don't see congress doing anything to fix it. There was a major utility shutdown due to security issues where they paid a ransom. Did you see Congress doing anything? This isn't exclusive to Twitter. Congress will use any situation to push their opportunistic rhetoric, and for them Twitter a social media company is more important to spread their propaganda than a credit bureau breach where everyone's personal data is compromised. What values does that show and teach, and why is that your talking point?
      - aaaaaaaaata 4y ago
        Who are you arguing for, and why?
        encryptluks2 4y ago
        I'm arguing for the people, who are you arguing for?
        aaaaaaaaata 4y ago
        > and why Anyway. I feel I'm doing the same by promoting responsible disclosure of unethical treatment of people's data. Did you even look at the guy's frigging Wikipedia page yet?! I just feel like we're talking past each other. Reading through rest of thread...Is this a Musk-related thing for you?
        encryptluks2 4y ago
        > Did you even look at the guy's frigging Wikipedia page yet?! Of course, but a Wikipedia page is not immune from bias nor does it provide unfettered credibility. I recall the same tactics and approaches being utilized in users pushing an agenda for Wikileaks, suggesting that they were basically perfect and incapable of doing any wrong and that Assange could do no harm. I don't give anyone a God-like status. > Reading through rest of thread...Is this a Musk-related thing for you? No, this is a personal experience kind of thing. I see this type of situation quite often where a topic will get people are riled up based on their political and personal biases and skew their critical-thinking ability to actually analyze the situation. If congress was actually concerned about people's data, they would have actually put forth efforts to enact some reasonable legislation that didn't just apply to whatever platform they feel the most censored on.
  - zhxshen 4y ago
    Mudge isn't a politician, has an excellent reputation, and would probably be much happier if Twitter just had its shit together in the first place so he doesn't have to kick-off a whistlestop tour on the subpoena train. First stop: getting grilled for 2h40m by geriatric attorneys & faded beauty queens. In other words, I see no reason for him to lie about any of this.
    - encryptluks2 4y ago
      - zhxshen 4y ago
        Comparing Mudge to a cop... Just Say No. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peiter_Zatko https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peiter_Zatko
        encryptluks2 4y ago
        Again, many similar people can build a positive public reputation but that doesn't mean they are immune from criticism or bad decision-making later in life. Epstein had a good reputation at one point. Larry Nasar had a good reputation at one point. Doesn't prevent people from doing bad things to further their own self-interests.
        aaaaaaaaata 4y ago
        > Epstein had a good reputation at one point. With you? He never did with me.
        encryptluks2 4y ago
        By former Presidents, CEOs, Prince's, etc. Glad you never got too close to him as there is no telling what kind of situation you'd end up in.
    - sangnoir 4y ago
- AnimalMuppet 4y ago
  Given Twitter's centrality in the flow of information, it would be unreasonable to not expect foreign agents (along with extremists of every flavor, financial fraud artists, and who knows what else) to try to get inside. The same is true of Facebook and Google.
  - zhxshen 4y ago
    Foreign agents run amok before an FBI warning: sure, shit happens. Foreign agents still running amok after an FBI warning: WTF?!
    - aaaaaaaaata 4y ago
      I'm not sure SoftBank/KSA is super concerned about "foreign agents" inside their company.
      - zhxshen 4y ago
        apparently so
ryzvonusef 4y ago
https://twitter.com/donie/status/1569695781631688704 https://twitter.com/donie/status/1569695781631688704 > "It's not far fetched to say an employee inside the company could take over the accounts of all the Senators in this room," @dotMudge with a warning here on Captiol Hill. #Twitter perhaps a valid reason?
- codyb 4y ago
  They probably have a way to take over accounts to check bug reports. We've had that at places I've worked. Where you'd be able to impersonate a user in order to see what was going on with their specific set of user data to corroborate their report and find a fix. The question is... are the permissions locked down, is access audited and immutable, etc I think.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    Yep, there's lots of software with "su for X" capabilities; it's much better than the normal method which is "ok tell me your password and I'll login as you and see what's up".
- AndrewStephens 4y ago
  Well Duh! Of course a twitter employee could take over any account. Hopefully they have some internal safeguards in place but there are probably hundreds of people there that could take over an account if they wanted to, just as the owners of news.ycombinator.com could take over any account here. You don't really own a Twitter (or Facebook, or ycombinator) account. Those services have an account on you. You update their account on you when you use their service to post (and they keep other information useful to their business on your account that you have no access to). This is just the way social media works.
  - michaelt 4y ago
    > Well Duh! Of course a twitter employee could take over any account. Most companies the size of Twitter would have a lot more controls than that on random employees' write access to production. If I want to assume a user's identity in my employer's production system I have to fill out a form justifying it, get my manager's approval for each account accessed, and my activity is subject to logging.
PKop 4y ago
If you pretend a platform for mass media, journalism, and public discourse that certainly affects domestic and international politics is trivial, sure. Just people huh? Not the Presidents, politicians, richest business men and high profile journalists right? To say nothing of all the other niche communities like finance and tech.
SanjayMehta 4y ago
Twitter is a propaganda network; whoever controls it, controls the narrative.
- nkozyra 4y ago
  How is that different than literally every other website or publication on earth?
  - illuminerdy 4y ago
    I think the scope and scale makes it different. Social media has become extremely important to the free and open exchange of ideas between people.
    - deltree7 4y ago
      Sinclair broadcasting has a far broader reach and actually influences ideologies that you can draw a direct correlation to ideology and Sinclair broadcast viewers. None of Twitter/FB/Youtube has that kind of correlation
    - nkozyra 4y ago
      > I think the scope and scale makes it different. Then what is the threshold wherein the natural inability to avoid bias becomes propaganda? Why is Twitter propaganda but not HN or my blog? When does it cross the line?
      - hackerlight 4y ago
        This is the binary bias[1]. You're trying to come up with hard distinctions and categories, when trying to do so is totally uninteresting and without any utility. I notice it's extremely common here on HN[2], perhaps because the job of an engineer involves working with categories, and something that's linguistically fuzzy is uncomfortable to them. I write more about this cognitive failing in the second half of my post here[3]. In short, there is no objective threshold wherein the natural inability to avoid bias becomes propaganda. And nor should we waste time on that point. Such a discussion is merely semantics around the definition of the word "propaganda". We should leave that to the people who compile dictionaries. Such clouded thinking has created a blind spot here in this very thread, e.g. that someone can say something so ridiculous as "How is that different than literally every other website or publication on earth?" and not get downvoted, as if the practical difference between a social media platform with access to hundreds of millions of eyeballs on the one hand, and a small blog on the other, is not self-evident. Such an obvious difference can only not be self-evident to someone who is incapable of understanding that things can vary by degree instead of by category. [1] https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/binary-bias-distorts-how-we-integrate-information.html https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/binary-bi... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32708833 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32708833 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32674580 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32674580
sc68cal 4y ago
This is all being done so that Elon Musk can back out of his contract to buy Twitter
- smt88 4y ago
  I hate Musk, but who cares what the motivation is? Shedding light on an (unfortunately very) influential company is good for the public. Musk shouldn't get out of his deal, but whatever he does to reveal malpractice at Twitter is good for all of us.
  - aaaaaaaaata 4y ago
    Or any/all large corps that hold extortion-level userdata on everybody, statistically speaking.
marcinzm 4y ago
I'd hope congress pays some attention to anything which 80 million Americans use or interact with.
esperent 4y ago
> on a social network where people share 280 character messages is fucking bizarre. reply Perhaps a less dismissive characterization of Twitter would help make it less bizarre? It's a platform used by many leading public figures, including US presidents, to share information and the 280 character limit is a format that often leads to less filtered communication than you'd get in other mediums.
TheRealDunkirk 4y ago
I think you're missing the point entirely. The fact that the world has gone bonkers over this whole farce proves that Twitter is just as influential as the most jaded critic has suspected. And then you stop and realize that the user numbers on Twitter are DWARFED by Facebook (and Instagram and TikTok), and you realize just how screwed we really are. And all for the sake of making some people insanely rich, by flooding every aspect of our lives with advertising.
RunSet 4y ago
https://www.forbes.com/sites/augustinefou/2021/06/07/the-curious-case-of-rebekah-jones-suspension-from-twitter/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/augustinefou/2021/06/07/the-cur...
thelock85 4y ago
> Society is becoming a parody of itself. We've accepted emotional, mental, spiritual, and physical (to some extent) abstractions of ourselves as our true selves. And exchanged social cues for algorithms to manipulate our behaviors. In the moments when you can break out of that abstraction the parody becomes so clear, and also terrifying. Like what are we actually building towards?
faeriechangling 4y ago
I’ve been hearing people downplay the seriousness of things on the internet my entire life and I’m mostly surprised at this point that people think that taking twitter seriously is such a ridiculous notion. If you instead say “international information system responsible for sending 500m messages daily including by senior govt/business officials has poor stewardship” I think it doesn’t seem so rediculous that senior government officials are so concerned. They all use Twitter, why wouldn’t they be concerned? You could easily cause militarily significant damage to a country with a good hack against twitter. There was a very politically significant insurrection organized on twitter, this system has already been used to direct an angry mob in the general direction of these high level government officials who proceeded to attempt to break down barricades and assault them.

zhxshen 4y ago

Feeling like Twitter is just about to ruin the low-regulation party for everybody. Could be wrong though. Not much happened after the Experian breach after all.

capableweb 4y ago
> Feeling like Twitter is just about to ruin the low-regulation party for everybody. Alternative take: Lawmakers are finally waking up and realizing how much these platforms can affect our daily lives, mostly because most common folk are signed up and use these platforms, and are starting to figure out how we can limit the damage for when things go wrong.
- dantheman 4y ago
  What damage?
  - nathancahill 4y ago
    And even further.. what wrong?
  - ElevenLathe 4y ago
  - PuppyTailWags 4y ago
    I think Twitter(and other social media) genuinely makes people's mental health worse. We have coined terms like "doomscrolling" and have studies to evidence that Instagram has a negative effect on the psychological wellbeing of teenage girls. I think that this can arguably fall into the category of "damage".
  - shadowgovt 4y ago
    In Twitter's case, for starters, the time they heavily incentivized sharing phone numbers with them and then used that information to accidentally build an open phone number harvester. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/02/how-twitters-default-settings-can-leak-your-phone-number https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/02/how-twitters-default-s...

seafoam 4y ago

mudge just testified in response to a Senator's question that Twitter does not have a test env

bombcar 4y ago
This is clearly perjury, you can find it at www.twitter.com /s
bushbaba 4y ago
To be fair. Many companies staging is unusable with testing in prod.
- nrmitchi 4y ago
  If I recall correctly, Uber literally did an entire post series about how they do all testing in production using feature flags and request routing, because it was "technically infeasible" at their scale to do anything differently.
  - m00x 4y ago
    Uber really isn't a great company to aspire to when it comes to tech. They have a similar mentality to Facebook of: "Spend more time getting it done than planning it out".
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
smt88 4y ago
What does that mean though? Twitter must have test environments for developers and automatic tests. Do they just not have a full staging environment? That would be understandable. It's impossible to create a production-like test environment for a product like Twitter. You're better off just doing canary releases or feature flags with slow rollouts.
- michaelt 4y ago

encryptluks2 4y ago

Please be on the lookout for grandstanding and do your own diligence in actually understanding the issues

freebreakfast 4y ago
I agree. Read about Mudge's history. When you understand Mudge, then you'll understand why this is not grandstanding on his part. You'll understand why he's not doing this support Musk, for money, to get back at Twitter, or any of that. You'll understand he's doing this because he cares very deeply about information security.

highwaylights 4y ago

Two big things about this that really grate me: 1) After Snowden, after Experian, after Pegasus, after decades of screaming about these issues and getting shushed and laughed at - that lefties might take over your twitter account is the straw that’ll break the camel’s back? Are you freaking kidding me? 2) Elon is going to get away with it. And he really shouldn’t - he already waived his right to back out based on any of this. Just because you like someone shouldn’t make them above the law, and basically the takeaway here will be that like Trump he’s above the law because a large enough section of the public likes him. Setting all of this aside, maybe it’s worth actually trying to do something about the real problem - that too many members of society (including the leaders) are dangerously under-informed for living in it, let alone governing. None of this should be news to anyone here.

TheRealDunkirk 4y ago
> that too many members of society (including the leaders) are dangerously under-informed for living in it, let alone governing And this might even be tenable, if they were to surround themselves with knowledgable people who could give them advice. But, in a situation not entirely dissimilar to the inner workings of large corporations, our leaders are surrounded by parasites who ride on the their backs, and lead them into making decisions that benefit themselves in the short term, instead of benefitting the country (or the company) in the long run. You can fix this in government by amending the Constitution to get rid of Citizens United ruling, and then tackling the lobbyist problem, as if either one were possible. And I don't know how you'd even begin to fix it in large corporations.
anonymouse008 4y ago
> 2) Elon is going to get away with it. And he really shouldn’t - he already waived his right to back out based on any of this. Just because you like someone shouldn’t make them above the law, and basically the takeaway here will be that like Trump he’s above the law because a large enough section of the public likes him. There’s no getting away with it. This was one hundred percent his plan the whole time - throw Twitter into chaos internally. Now for what reasons remain to be seen, but his extensive use of Twitter was highly unusual as a high profile CEO basically rewriting the PR game (which the SEC tried to reign in). That experience gives him unique insight into how Twitter works and what power it holds - he may very well feel a government party is influencing the platform too much and he’d rather destroy Twitter than lose control of it.

nrmitchi 4y ago

This entire thing is so bizarre to me. There is a room full of non-technical senators effectively testifying the unproven and one-sided statements of a single person (Zatko), who was let go from Twitter, with no ability for Twitter (or anyone at the company) to defend themselves or refute these statements.

zitterbewegung 4y ago
What you say is untrue. Bloomberg: Grassley says Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal declined an invitation to appear today. Kurt Wagner Tech Reporter
- pclmulqdq 4y ago
  For good reason. Usually, these whistleblower sessions are used as a place to get sound bites for campaigning and give the CEO a tongue lashing. Due to the pending acquisition, this one has stakes that are about 100x higher than the typical whistleblower session. If Parag Agrawal screws up at this hearing, it could literally cost him billions of dollars. Let's be real: Twitter is a huge cesspool of harassment, hosts a ton of pornography (including from children), and clearly has monetization/business problems. It also seems to have much worse engineering than other social businesses. It's going to be a lot harder to defend in one of these sessions than Facebook.
  - mschuster91 4y ago
    > Let's be real: Twitter is a huge cesspool of harassment, hosts a ton of pornography (including from children) For the porn: So do Reddit and Facebook, with the latter having had multiple lawsuits by former content moderators for the uncountable amount of CSAM and gore [1]. The first "most popular" subreddit was r/NSFW, followed by r/gonewild - Reddit literally got big with porn. As for harassment: Facebook with its closed groups is just as bad if not worse for radicalization (simply because way more people use it and no one monitors these groups, not to mention open channels such as newspaper comment sections), with direct links to deadly unrest such as in India [2]. Meta's other products are a horror show in themselves - Whatsapp has a history with mobs riled up by fake news to the point these have their own Wikipedia listicle [3] and Instagram has been under fire for years in helping to aid eating disorders [4]. It's bad enough that there are so many bad actors on Twitter, but the simple fact that Facebook makes billions of dollars in profit each year and doesn't even come close to the amount of moderation they would need makes them even worse. [1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/a35xk5/facebook-moderators-are-suing-for-trauma-ptsd https://www.vice.com/en/article/a35xk5/facebook-moderators-a... [2] https://www.dw.com/en/india-facebook-under-the-microscope-over-ignoring-hate-speech/a-59610062 https://www.dw.com/en/india-facebook-under-the-microscope-ov... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_WhatsApp_lynchings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_WhatsApp_lynchings [4] https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/News/instagram-eating-disorders-depression-young-girls-lawsuits-claim/story?id=87418473 https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/News/instagram-eating-disorders-d...

sbf501 4y ago

i forgot what side of this issue i'm on.

uwuemu 4y ago
the only reasonable response in this thread... then again I stopped reading it after I got to the "Elon's going to get away with it" part
thatguy0900 4y ago
Do you want a openly malicious company or a inept/secretly malicious regulatory body
- sbf501 4y ago
  - scifibestfi 4y ago
    How about we focus on zero people in poverty? You know, focus on raising people up instead of focusing on tearing people down. A growth mindset is more productive than a scarcity, zero sum mindset.
    - guelo 4y ago
      Money=power, including political power. Politically active billionaires violate the one-man-one-vote principle, especially after the supreme court ruled that money=speech in Citizen United.
      - LawTalkingGuy 4y ago
        Is this going to be the "interstate commerce clause" for the left, by which absolute interference is justified because everything, even non-commercial private actions, are interstate at some point, or displace something which might have been interstate. Because nobody is ever exactly "equal" to someone else, in ability, resources, etc, nobody but the most victimized person can actually vote. By this logic any difference in equity absolutely demolishes the concept of democracy thus before the people can be trusted with any input they must all be "equalized" and placed into an economic system that keeps them that way. And before then, any inequality or privilege discovered or invented can be used to entirely negate a person's opinion. That's the only way you can have it. Either billionaires have the same rights we have, and more resources, or we've all got a boot on our necks that takes away anyone's freedoms whenever they become inconvenient for the state.

an1sotropy 4y ago

In response to Sen Grassley wrapping up questions about how Twitter executives wanted to address employee concerns about accepting ad money from Chinese companies, possibly with Chinese govt links (even while Twitter is banned in China): 28:25 [Mudge] "We're already in bed, it would be problematic if we lost that revenue stream, so figure out a way to make people comfortable with it." That isn't really surprising, but it's still bad. It's also worrying that some Americans complain about "big [US] government" to justify the very limited size and power of the FTC to regulate US big tech, while somehow overlooking the threat from the big Chinese government, its awful human rights record, and its track record of working to gain access into US companies. It's really easy to criticize these senators for not being tech ignorant, but this is the only govt we have, and it's the only one that can empower the FTC to do more.

schnable 4y ago
> It's also worrying that some Americans complain about "big [US] government" to justify the very limited size and power of the FTC to regulate US big tech, while somehow overlooking the threat from the big Chinese government, its awful human rights record, and its track record of working to gain access into US companies. How is a bigger/more powerful FTC an antidote to the bad behavior of the Chinese government, or a defense against them?
- ethanbond 4y ago
  Not that I necessarily believe in this, but you could imagine e.g. FTC or FCC requiring content-neutrality. In that world, China's asks for censorship go up against US's asks for no censorship. In this current world, China's asks for censorship go up against... employees' personal appetite for losing money (and potentially their jobs) in exchange for a non-China dominated information space?
- codyb 4y ago
  Maybe they could enforce rules notifying users where their ads were coming from?
- an1sotropy 4y ago

mjreacher 4y ago

On another thread that didn't receive the same attention as this one we learn the Twitter has Chinese and Indian government agents amongst their employees. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32825670 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32825670

dredmorbius 4y ago
And that execs simply don't care: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32832796 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32832796>

remarkEon 4y ago

Testimony actually starts at roughly 13:00 with an opening statement by Durbin.

cronix 4y ago

This is the part that I think leaves Twitter severely exposed, at least in the EU with GDPR (from my limited, basic understanding of GDPR). Twitter does not delete data when requested by users to delete their account. https://youtu.be/A0A-uOhMU1Y?t=7219 https://youtu.be/A0A-uOhMU1Y?t=7219

m00x 4y ago
We spent a lot of time on this when I was at Segment. It's incredibly hard for an evented system to go back through archives and delete every data from a user, but it's possible. It should be much easier for Twitter to do this, so there are no user merges (anonymous user becomes identified and merges), but I'm not sure about their data storage. This should have been done years ago.

etchalon 4y ago

Midge's point seems to be, "Twitter refused to spend the money, or change their processes, necessary to guarantee data authority, access and visibility." What till these Senators learn about basically every other business in America.

jti107 4y ago

sounds like security issues of a startup that quickly scaled and never dealt with the technical debt rather than anything malicious.

lazide 4y ago
At some point, not doing it - despite billions in revenue, and massive numbers of engineers - is indistinguishable from active maliciousness.

0x_rs 4y ago

From the video, funny bit at about 01:01:00: I'm reminded of one conversation with an executive, when I said I am confident we have a foreign agent, and their response was "well, since we already have one, what does it matter if we have more, let's keep growing the office"

8bitsrule 4y ago

After an hour of this hearing, the smell reminds me of Enron.

vinay_ys 4y ago

If twitter implemented the following, it would take much of the steam out of this case: 1. Restricted/conditional/temporary access to production systems with extensive centralised audit logging. 2. Handled phone# and geo-location data as sensitive personally identifiable information (SPII) – kept this data in one centralized place (a micro service with well-defined access controlled apis) and prevented its proliferation into other systems. And promptly deleted it when users deleted their accounts. To implement these two things, it wouldn't cost anywhere near $150M. And likely it wouldn't impact the velocity of their revenue features too much either (impact would be something like slow-down for quarter). Sad thing is senators are picking on only some companies and not others. Instead, they should be making a comprehensive data privacy act that applies to all companies – like credit card companies, shopping/loyalty-card companies, all the data brokers etc.

spfzero 4y ago
They're not picking on one company arbitrarily. There was a specific whistleblower complaint sent to the SEC, about Twitter. Twitter is a large company, and the SEC has to take notice by law. Twitter sticks up as it is such a large company with so many customers, the complaint is authoritative, and there was an agreement in 2011 with the government which the complaint argues has been broken by Twitter. That agreement implied that Twitter would do your 1. and 2., starting 11 years ago, and they seem to have not.
- sangnoir 4y ago
  > SEC has to take notice by law. Senate =/= SEC
  - spfzero 4y ago
    Congress oversees the SEC.
    - sangnoir 4y ago
      Yet congress doesn't have hearings on every SEC investigation. GPs claim was congress would better spend its time writing industry-wide laws instead of this dog-and-pony show (my words). Parent refutation was that the SEC is obligated to look into every allegation - my observation was that congress doesn't have to micromanage SEC investigations. I support gp - congress should be legislating or involving the SEC officials to see where the gaps in the law are, rather than seeking soundbites.

mikewarot 4y ago

It's just jaw dropping how they thought nothing of externalizing the costs of every possible problem or technical debt in order to keep chasing the next bonus.

aaaaaaaaata 4y ago
We keep providing the incentives and being surprised.

kornhole 4y ago

Why shouldn't each politician set up her own Mastodon server moderated by her staffers? Then they would have complete control of data that they don't publish to the world. They also can't be cancelled, shadow banned, or censored by any company or government.