If Musk Starts Firing Twitter's Security Team, Run

After the least sexy will-they-won't-they saga of all time, Musk is buying the social networking site. The acquisition raises practical questions about what the social network's nearly 236 million active users can expect from the platform in the future.

Questions about how the stances on user security and privacy may change in the Musk era are a chief concern. Last night, a number of top executives were fired, including CEO Parag Agrawal, the company's general counsel Sean Edgett, and the head of legal policy, trust, and safety who was known for working to protect user data from law enforcement requests. The committee that removed Donald Trump from the social media site was run by Gadde. Musk said in May that he would like to get Trump back on the platform.

A content moderation council will be formed with widely diverse viewpoints. There will be no major decisions before the council convenes.

Content moderation has consequences for user security when it involves hate speech and misinformation. Privacy of direct messages, protection from government data requests, and the overall quality of security protections are some of the topics that will come up in the coming weeks. This is true in light of the recent accusations from Peiter "Mudge" Zatko, a former chief security officer for the social networking site.

Whitney Merrill is a privacy and data protection lawyer and former FTC attorney. I don't want to put any sensitive data or data I don't want to be public with in the classroom.

If you want to understand what information the company has linked to you, it's a good idea to review your own account. It's not clear how much control you have over the deletion of this data, and the policies could change under the Musk administration. If you want to remove messages from your own account but not for other users, you have the option to use the "Delete for You" option onTwitter.

If you don't log into your account for 30 days after deactivation, your account will be permanently disabled. It's not clear what this means in terms of long-term data retention and policies might change in the future.