After the Federal Trade Commission launched a probe into Twitter over privacy concerns, Twitterโs negotiations with the FTC do not seem to be going very well. Last week, it was revealed that Twitter CEO Elon Muskโs request last year for a meeting with FTC Chair Lina Khan was rebuffed. Now, a senior Twitter lawyer, Christian Dowellโwho was closely involved in those FTC talksโhas resigned, several people familiar with the matter told The New York Times.
Dowell joined Twitter in 2020 and rose in the ranks after several of Twitterโs top lawyers exited or were fired once Musk took over the platform in the fall of 2022, Bloomberg reported. Most recently, Dowellโwho has not yet confirmed his resignationโoversaw Twitterโs product legal counsel. In that role, he was โintimately involvedโ in the FTC negotiations, sources told the Times, including coordinating Twitterโs responses to FTC inquiries.
The FTC has overseen Twitterโs privacy practices for more than a decade after it found that the platform failed to safeguard personal information and issued a consent order in 2011. The agency launched its current probe into Twitterโs operations after Musk began mass layoffs that seemed to introduce new security concerns, AP News reported. The Times reported that the FTC's investigation intensified after security executives quit Twitter over concerns that Musk might be violating the FTC's privacy decree.
Earlier this month, when Twitter CEO Elon Musk locked his Twitter account to personally test whether locked tweets generated more views than public tweets, many wondered why he didnโt just ask a Twitter engineer how the platform worked. A new report says Musk did meet with engineersโafter his testโand that meeting led him to impulsively fire an engineer who attempted to provide an alternative explanation for why Muskโs tweet views might be declining.
The meeting took place on Tuesday, according to the tech newsletter Platformer. Bringing together engineers and advisers, Musk asked his team why his account, which has โmore than 100 million followers,โ would only be getting โtens of thousands of impressions.โ
โThis is ridiculous,โ Musk said, according to multiple sources.