Internal Battle revealed…Interesting Development

So, every once in a while CNN does some journalism. This article is surprisingly good and detailed about the Twitter whistleblower who filed a complaint about the company’s incredibly pathetic internal controls.

We’ve always known that Twitter was a manipulated playground with variably-applied Terms of Service depending on whatever Davos told us was “the latest thing.’

But that doesn’t cover the half of it. The reality is that it wasn’t some evil mandated corporate conspiracy, but rather a poorly-built internal architecture which was purposefully allowed to remain broken for plausible deniability purposes.

This paragraph is the money shot for the entire article:

What Zatko says he found was a company with extraordinarily poor security practices, including giving thousands of the company’s employees — amounting to roughly half the company’s workforce — access to some of the platform’s critical controls. His disclosure describes his overall findings as “egregious deficiencies, negligence, willful ignorance, and threats to national security and democracy.”
As Dexter White put it to me Twitter gave “root admin privs for Tumblrinas” to run around doing their thing. Here’s the internal corporate structure within Twitter, as revealed by this single paragraph.

After a showdown with the FTC in 2010 to give the company cover that it was under proper government oversight, Twitter grew with no internal regard to those mandates, instead leaving a flimsy server architecture in place, poor employee oversight and a Technology vertical led by someone sympathetic to a particular worldview.

All you need then is an HR department that puts its thumb on the scale of hiring practices and you build an edifice of Tumblrinas running around doing “God’s work” silencing anyone with the wrong ideas.

In the process CEO Jack Dorsey had his company effectively taken away from him, and he was marginalized to the point of being the target of our vitriol. Typical misdirection by Davos to hide the real villain, former CTO and current CEO Parag Agrawal, who was promoted for his good work in turning Twitter into a megaphone for the WEF.

The story here is fascinating, Dorsey hires Zatko to shore up the company’s internal processes but he reports to Agrawal who stymies him at every turn and then fires him for ’cause,’ ensuring he can’t get another job in the industry.

Then Twitter promotes Agrawal after finally turning the world against Jack Dorsey for the thousand poison flowers he let bloom within the company. The only thing that upset this apple cart was a bored Elon Musk who, like a lot of people who used to benefit from this shitty system, decided to turn his enormous pile of “Fuck You Money” into a stake in Twitter.

I have to wonder who Zatko ultimately worked for this entire time and why? You have to think that Dorsey knew what was going on but was really powerless to stop it. Was he Dorsey/Musk’s mole within the company to root this stuff out and set the hook for Musk’s takeover?

I doubt it but it makes a good story worthy of MI6. More likely Dorsey had simply had enough of this, understood the risks to the company he’d built because of Agrawal and the Board’s reckless behavior and tried to slow it all down.

His reward was a good ol’ corporate decapitation.

But, with the shift in leadership at Warner Bros. Discovery is this the only way such a detailed article gets published by CNN, who would normally bury the lede if not memory hole the entire story?

The bottom line here is that Davos’ control over Twitter is slipping and someone is helping Musk out here. This l’affair Zatko is a very big deal. It portends that the suit against Musk will get thrown out and he could still wind up buying the company for a lot less than $44 billion.

Why this matters should be obvious, regardless of how angry we are with Twitter, big tech companies, etc.

There are a lot more of you here reading this article today behind my mild paywall because Elon Musk blew up Twitter in March. The growth rate here changed slope dramatically because those Tumblrinas that had been suppressing alternative voices had to remove the roadblocks while Musk was digging through the company’s books.

The growth is stark, guys. And I’m not the only creator to see this. Twitter is an amazing marketing tool. Davos understands this. They understand why it’s more important than Facebook at this point. The ability to jump containment into new addressable markets is unparalleled. It allows us to find our audiences in a way that ensures our survival.

The whole point of compromising Twitter was to discourage conservatives, populists, and truth-tellers and ‘go build your own.’ We see with Gab and Parler how well that works out.

The purpose of Twitter is to break down echo chambers, not create them. Musk understands this. So does Davos. That’s why the Tumblrina Army was nurtured and actively recruited.

It’s also why I stayed on the platform, same as Patreon. This too shall pass. It always does. I have deep faith that eventually the truth overwhelms the lies. Eventually the incentives for maintaining the lies reverse and the dam breaks.

There is diminishing marginal utility even in lying. As long as events like this keep happening in Musk’s favor there is a path to getting a hold of the megaphone.

Can’t stop the signal.