Gouthro says that Tripp didn’t sabotage Tesla or hack anything and that Musk knew this and sought to damage his reputation by spreading misinformation.
Investigators, he claims, hacked into Tripp’s phone, had him followed, and misled police about the surveillance. Gouthro says Tesla’s security operation behaved unethically in its zeal to nail the leaker. The security manager at the Gigafactory, an ex-military guy with a high-and-tight haircut named Sean Gouthro, has filed a whistleblower report with the SEC. It wasn’t that long ago that Elon Musk was accused of trying to destroy a Tesla whistleblower and doing some fairly questionable things in the process:
It’s much easier to protect information you don’t have, yet Musk now appears to want that information.Īnd, frankly, Musk’s own history regarding such things is not encouraging. And that’s not even touching on how it will also make this “authentication” database a hacking target. Beyond going to court to defend the privacy and 1st Amendment anonymity rights of these users, Twitter also could (in the past) more credibly note that it doesn’t have certain information about many of those users, and might not have their real names.īut if Musk moves forward with “authenticating all real humans” not only will it now carry much more of that information, but it will make it a much bigger target for people who are seeking to unmask critics on Twitter - including foreign state actors. We’ve seen over and over again how thin-skinned rich and powerful users have sought to subpoena Twitter to seek out and identify online critics.
Indeed, one of the changes that Musk has pushed for, to “authenticate all real humans”, works directly against this history.Įven if the plan is not to force a “real names” policy on Twitter users, but rather just for Twitter to know the real identity of all its users, that still creates massive risks - especially for people who are already at risk or marginalized.
Given Musk’s statements to date about free speech, he seems more focused on the content moderation side of things than the actual 1st Amendment issues at play. Will the legal team continue to do so under Musk? One hopes so, but it now becomes much more of an open question. The company has always been extremely proactive in defending what the 1st Amendment actually protects. Those are just the tip of the iceberg of the legal efforts that Twitter has been involved in to protect actual free speech/1st Amendment concerns. The company also spent years fighting for its own 1st Amendment rights to reveal when governments demand information from companies, something it chose to do alone, after all the other big internet companies reached a settlement with the DOJ over what they would reveal regarding government demands for information. From early on, when various entities both private and public have sought to unmask anonymous Twitter users, the company has gone out of its way to defend the right to anonymity and to push back on questionable subpoenas that seek to unmask people over 1st Amendment protected speech. Twitter’s legal team has been one of the most aggressive (if not the single most aggressive) companies in defending the privacy and free speech rights of its users. Unfortunately, when most people talk about Twitter and “free speech” it’s the content moderation aspects that they’re referring to.īut, back here in reality, Twitter’s actual role in supporting free speech and the 1st Amendment often plays out quite differently: in court. I’ve explained why his conception of free speech is incredibly naïve and his ideas around content moderation are not just outdated but counterproductive. Tue, Apr 26th 2022 09:31am - Mike Masnickįor all the talk of how Elon Musk wanted to buy Twitter to make it more supportive of free speech, there remain a ton of questions about what it will actually mean in practice.