Page 4 - Inside Twitter News Today

To the report that just aired. it says there are more bots being reported. twitter is so much in the news, and its future, you know, on the line here. >> there will be a five-day trial in obctober. elon musk trying to get out of buying twitter in part because he says there are more automated accounts, spam accounts, than the company cops to. the company can sometimes be a little squishy and point out, no, some of these accounts are good. if you get a weather alert or you get an alert about vacci...

And had trained staff to protect themselves against hacking. >> if youre running any system, the more people that have access to the main switches, thats a very risky situation. >> yes, absolutely. im talking in generalities just large tech companies need to know what the risks are and then they also need to have an appetite to go fix it. >> reporter: zatko also claims twitter has been misleading about how many fake accounts and bots are on its platform. thats an issue that elon musk made centra...

Narrative about our privacy and data security practices that is riddled with inconsistencies and inaccuracies and lacks important context. when we spoke to zatko and his lawyer, they said the lawful whistle-blower disclosure process only allows them to talk about the issues in general terms. for specific allegations they referred us to zatkos disclosure. >> i wont go into details. mudge stands by the disclosure and the allegations in there. >> reporter: cnn and "the washington post" obtained a c...

And the information could move there faster, in an attack, than anyone would be able to respond to. >> look at the last administration, the white house said tweets were official white house statements, whatever trump said on there. i think thats when people look at the accounts that they accessed. part of this is not just in that sense, it is also for regular users, donie, and the reporting you have, they are not reliably deleting data when people cancel their accounts. >> thats a big part, part...

Attacks of all time. you know, this is a warning from chuck yeager saying im worried about the danger of that plane. this is -- this is someone you have to listen to. now, when you get into what his actual allegations are, what, again, really stands out is how long twitter has been working on some of these internal controls, and they still fail. and, of course, mudge was brought on after this incredibly worrisome hack of some of the most prominent -- most prominent accounts on twitter. were all ...

There are national security and business implications, so joining us now, cnn chief business correspondent christine romans and author of the only plane in the sky garrett graf. youre written extensively about national security. i want to start with the national security implication here. when a whistle-blower says twitter is a threat to national security and democracy, that sounds alarming. why exactly, what do you see in this that is of such concern? >> i think there are two things that stand ...

Saudi national was convicted on criminal charges here in the united states of working for saudi intelligence to target dissidents on its platform from inside twitter. so there is an external threat to twitter that is documented here, there is also a pretty serious internal threat of employees who might be compromised by foreign intelligence that twitter is not taking seriously internally. and in ways that donie would understand from covering this, you know, of course foreign intelligence service...

No shortage of outrage, what are they saying? >> to garretts point, this guy, this whistle-blower is legend. we were calling out a lot of cybersecurity experts saying, what do you think of this guy, is there anything we can -- where can we look at this guy, we might say hes oversaying things? and people say if hes saying theres something there, theres something there. so twitter is in this position now where their chief of security, who is hired by jack dorsey, is calling all of this out. twitte...

Clear that it will. but i dont know. perhaps, in his position, you are in a place where the more pressure brought to bear from external forces, the better. you know, but its not to insinuate that he is somehow arranging this, but it is interesting. also, the question of, you know, beating up on social media like twitter, its his favorite thing of the republican political circus at this point in time. so the closer he can get to conservative, political figures like the texas ag, the better hes pr...

Throw at you, i think its really interesting new wrinkle, is that the texas attorney general has just announced that hes gonna be looking into the question of box on twitter. as you know, texas is a new home of -- so thats a funny coincidence. so looking at a strange moment. im just wondering whats gonna come next. its really curious to see whats gonna try and pull up, you know, cozy up to a republican politician, perhaps. is he gonna try and get into the right guy out of the midterms? perhaps s...