Clay Haynes, a senior network security engineer at Twitter, claimed the company “disturbs him,” and called it “creepy Big Brother” during a secret recording made by Project Veritas as part of their investigation into the company.
“It is creepy Big Brother. I mean it’s like a level… I don’t want to say it freaks me out, but it disturbs me,” Haynes proclaimed. “I get to look at all of the reported tweets, which means I’ve seen a lot of dick pics. It’s ridiculous… We can actually read your DMs… I’ve seen way more penises than I’ve ever wanted to see in my life.”
“DMs, tweets, yes. Lots of dicks… Unfortunately, there is a lot of porn,” he continued. “This sounds horrible, but I’m actually glad it’s just dicks, it’s just blow job pictures, it’s just that type of stuff.”
“These are private messages?” asked Project Veritas’ James O’Keefe during the secretly filmed encounter.
“Both private and public messages,” Haynes replied.
“Do you have access to DMs at Twitter?” responded O’Keefe.
“I do, yeah,” claimed Haynes.
O’Keefe then declared, “So, when people have access to this stuff, they can leak it. It happens,” prompting Haynes to confirm, “Oh yeah, and it’s a genie out of the bottle kind of thing after that point. You know?”
“Sure, I can fire them. Heck, I can probably even sue them, in some cases. But, the genie’s already out of the bottle,” Haynes concluded. “Like, how do you recoup costs. You can’t calculate the cost or the damage of that.”
In another recording with Project Veritas, Haynes claimed “there’s teams” of employees looking at private user messages.
“I mean, we’re talking, we’re talking three or four, at least three or four hundred people,” he explained. “They’re paid to look at dick pics. You know, there’s girls with full spread eagle pictures on there.”
Despite Haynes’ claims that there are at least three or four hundred employees looking for content that breaks platform rules, Twitter frequently allows violent and rule-breaking content to go unsanctioned, while conservatives are often punished.
Posts that celebrate violence against police, racist attacks against Breitbart News reporters, and ISIS accounts are all left untouched by Twitter. The team alleged to number up to 400 people it not spending their work day finding those types of posts, so what exactly do they focus on?
Charlie Nash is a reporter for Breitbart Tech. You can follow him on Twitter @MrNashington, or like his page at Facebook.