Twitter whistleblower Peiter Zatko’s claims that the social media giant has endangered users in China have raised questions about big tech’s responsibility to protect dissidents from state persecution.
Zatko, Twitter’s former head of security, has alleged that the social media platform became “dependent” on revenue from Chinese entities, making them potentially privy to information that could allow them to identify and glean sensitive information on users in China.
Twitter, like Facebook and Google, is banned in mainland China, where open dissent against the ruling Communist Party carries the risk of severe punishment. Chinese users can only access the platform through an encrypted connection known as a virtual private network (VPN), the use of which is also prohibited.
“Twitter executives knew that accepting Chinese money risked endangering users in China (where employing VPNs or other circumvention technologies to access the platform is prohibited) and elsewhere,” Zatko said in his disclosure, which was filed last month with several US government agencies, including the Department of Justice, and made public this week by The Washington Post and CNN.
“Twitter executives understood this constituted a major ethical ‘compromise.’ Mr. Zatko was told that Twitter was too dependent upon the revenue stream at this point to do anything other than attempt to increase it.”
Zatko’s allegations have reverberated among Chinese dissidents and human rights activists, raising calls for Twitter to clarify whether it has put China-based users at risk.
On Wednesday, Renee Xia, director of Washington, DC-based Chinese Human Rights Defenders, asked if the tech giant bore responsibility for the prosecution of a number of Chinese Twitter users, including Beijing activist Quan Shixin, who was indicted in 2020 for “picking quarrels and provoking trouble”, a catch-all charge commonly used to punish dissent.
Yaqiu Wang, a senior researcher on China at Human Rights Watch, said the allegations were especially concerning given the history of Chinese authorities cracking down on anonymous users of the platform.
“In recent years, the Chinese authorities have cracked down on Chinese Twitter users; many of them used anonymous accounts,” Wang told Al Jazeera.
