Musk’s lawyer tells Twitter staff they won’t be liable if company violates FTC consent decree

Following a warning shot from the FTC to Twitter yesterday, an internal email was sent by Alex Spiro to all remaining employees, in which he claimed that they did not have individual liability for complying with the requirements of the FTC.

We reproduced the full text of the email that Spiro sent to the staff of the social media site.

Elon – questions have arisen today regarding the consent decree in effect at the time you took over the company.

We have our first upcoming compliance check with the ftc since taking over and we will handle it.

The only party to the decree is Twitter- not individuals who work at Twitter. It is Twitter itself (not individual employees) who is a party and therefore only Twitter the company could be liable.

I understand that there have been employees at Twitter who do not even work on the ftc matter commenting that they could to to jail if we were not in compliance- that is simply not how this works. It is the company’s obligation. It is the company’a burden. It is the company’s liability.

We spoke to the FTC today about our continuing obligations and have a constructive ongoing dialogue.

We will of course remain in compliance with the consent decree and the legal department is handling it and happy to answer any questions

Thanks

Alex

The consent decree required the creation and maintenance of a program to make sure that the security, privacy, confidentiality, or integrity of any nonpublic consumer information is protected.

A departing internal attorney said in a note that individual engineers do engender personal, professional and legal risk, seemingly in contradiction to what Spiro said in the email.

The Chief Information Security Officer, Chief Compliance Officer, and Chief Privacy Officer all left the company on Thursday. In light of the consent decree, the FTC is keeping a close eye on the situation at the social networking site.

The FTC fined the social networking site $150 million for a violation of a settlement related to user data being used for ad targeting.

We reached out to the FTC for clarification regarding the consent decree and individual employee liability and will update if we get more info.

FTC warns ‘no CEO or company is above the law’ if Twitter shirks privacy order