The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) of the United States has asked micro-blogging platform Twitter whether the organisation has all the resources needed to comply with a privacy consent decree, says a report by news agency Reuters. This comes amid the ongoing tumultuous period of mass layoffs at Twitter after tech billionaire Elon Musk recently purchased the platform for $44 billion.
Multiple concerns led the FTC to engage and "track recent developments at Twitter with deep concern." The FTC was quoted as saying by the report: "No CEO or company is above the law, and companies must follow our consent decrees." In May this year, Twitter agreed to pay $150 million to evaluate and test all the potential features for data privacy and security issues.
Recent actions and Musk's handling of operations at Twitter have raised concerns that the social media giant might fail to abide by a May 2022 settlement with the US regulator, the Reuters report added. The company had expressed its willingness to improve its privacy practices.
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The social media company settled and resolved all accusations of misusing private information, like cellphone numbers, for advertising purposes. This happened after telling people that information was supposed to be used for reasons related to security and safety. These particular settlements further raised questions and doubts that the platform had contravened and violated the consent decree that was reached in 2011 after data breaches. Back then, the company had pledged not to misuse and mislead users about privacy protections and related matters.
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Meanwhile, Twitter has suspended multiple accounts of prominent journalists from The New York Times, The Washington Post, and CNN, among others. All of these personalities have one thing in common: they have been covering the platform's developments for the past few months. Although it remains unclear as to why these Twitter accounts were suspended, each one of them received a message that said the account was suspended since it "violated the Twitter rules," according to media reports.
The suspensions were also imposed on Twitter's rival platforms, India's homegrown alternative Koo and Mastodon. It said that Twitter blocked one of its accounts for violating the rules of the micro-blogging platform. However, Musk indicated that all these suspensions were the result of Twitter's new rules banning private jet trackers, as per a report by NBC News.