Twitter quietly fired a suspected Saudi Arabian spy in 2015, report says

We’ve all seen what can happen when nefarious interests weaponize a social media platform like Twitter. Now imagine how much worse it would be if some foreign agent actually got a job at the company.

That’s what happened in 2013, apparently. In a sprawling Saturday New York Times report looking at the Saudi Arabian leadership’s social media campaign to silence critics and influence thinking, one detail stands out: The story of former Twitter employee Ali Alzabarah.

Alzabarah joined the company in 2013 and worked his way into an engineering position that afforded him access to “the personal information and account activity of Twitter’s users, including phone numbers and I.P. addresses, unique identifiers for devices connected to the internet,” the Times report said. Read more…

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