Twitter Caught Selling Data to Government Spies While Complaining About Surveillance
The social network formerly known as Twitter and now called X has for the better part of the past decade been involved in a lawsuit suing the US government for greater transparency on its surveillance practices on the platform.
The lawsuit continued under Elon Musk after he took over in 2022. When the Supreme Court eventually struck down the suit in January, Musk wrote that it was "disappointing."
But now, newly obtained emails have left both X and Musk, who has long claimed to be a champion of free speech, with egg on their faces. The Intercept reports that despite railing against state spying, the social media company has been quietly profiting off it this entire time — selling a "firehose" of user data for the explicit purpose of being used by law enforcement.
According to the report, the data is sold to the surveillance firm Dataminr, which uses AI technology to constantly monitor public activity on social media and other parts of the web.
