Former Twitter Exec Accuses Company of Misleading Regulators and Board on Security ‘Deficiencies’ and Spam

thewrap.com:

obtained by the Washington Post and CNN and published Tuesday. In the complaint, filed last month with the Securities Exchange Commission and the Federal Trade Commission, former Twitter exec Peiter Zatko argues that the company’s security lapses pose a threat to users’ personal information as well as national security.

Zatko, who reported directly to Twitter’s CEO before he was fired in January, also alleges that the company broke the terms of a 2011 settlement with the Federal Trade Commission promising that it had an airtight security protocol.

Zatko also claimed that Twitter prioritized user growth over combating spam accounts, according to his complaint, even offering up to $10 million in executive bonuses for increasing daily users with no similar incentives for reducing spam accounts.

That allegation will be of particular interest to Elon Musk, who is seeking to extricate himself from a $44 billion deal to buy the company, in part over what he claims is a lack of visibility into the number of spam and bot accounts on the platform. (Twitter has denied Musk’s claims and sued for the Tesla CEO to follow through on his acquisition.) “We have already issued a subpoena for Mr.