Social media network, Twitter, is fighting back claims that its employees have access to DMs partially. The company is denying these claims after an undercover video of Twitter’s top engineers claiming that direct messages are read by hundred of employees leaked. The video which was shot by James O’Keefe features Clay Haynes, senior network security engineer, claiming that Twitter employees see ‘everything you post’, including ‘private DMs’.
Here’s what Haynes said:
‘There are teams dedicated to it. At least, three or four hundred people.’
To which, Pranay Singh, the direct messaging engineer, said:
‘So all your sex messages and your, like, d*** pics, are on my server now.’
As expected, the leak has been met with much backlash from the platform’s users. The company has since released a statement in which they denied that their employees actively monitor the direct messages of users.
‘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.’
According to Twitter executives, most of the moderation is done by algorithms, not people.