Twitter Denies Claim That 'Hundreds' Of Employees Are Reading Direct Messages

Undercover footage caught two Twitter engineers claiming that staff were reading private messages.
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Twitter has denied that “hundreds” of its employees are paid to simply read through people’s private Direct Messages.

This comes after undercover footage emerged showing two Twitter engineers claiming that “hundreds” of employees were paid to look at “everything you post online.”

Kacper Pempel / Reuters

The video was posted by the ultra-conservative activist group Project Veritas and showed several of the group’s members chatting to Twitter engineer Clay Haynes and Pranay Singh.

Twitter responded to the claims with a statement to Buzzfeed News which said:

“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.”

Project Veritas has been posting a number of sting videos as part of its own investigation into Twitter including recent footage which appears to show Haynes speaking on behalf of the company and saying it would be happy to hand over President Trump’s Direct Messages to the US Department of Justice as part of any investigation.

In response to this, a Twitter spokesperson said: “We deplore the deceptive and underhanded tactics by which this footage was obtained and selectively edited to fit a pre-determined narrative.”

Project Veritas is known for its undercover ‘sting’ operations. Late last year the group tried, and failed, to get The Washington Post to publish a fake story about Republican Senate nominee Roy Moore.

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