Tech Media Silent Once Again on Project Veritas Twitter Bombshells

Following the publication of Project Veritas’ third bombshell video, which detailed Twitter employees searching through the private messages of users, nearly all major online tech publications have ignored the story entirely.

The latest Project Veritas video about social media platform Twitter is focused on alleged misuse of private user data. One of the clips in the video features former Twitter direct messaging engineer Pranay Singh openly stating that Twitter has access to all of their user’s private messages and photos. In the video, Singh states:

Everything you send is stored on my server. You can’t [delete it], it’s already on my server now… So all your sex messages and your, like, dick pics are on my server now. All your illegitimate wives, and, like, all the girls you’ve been fucking around with, they are on my server now. I’m going to send it to your wife, she’s gonna use it in your divorce… So what happens is, like, when you write stuff or when you post pictures online, they never go away. Like, they’re always on there… Even after you send them, people are, like, analyzing them, to see what you’re interested in, to see what you’re talking about, and they sell that data… Everything. Anything you post online.

This sort of admission from a former employee at one of the most popular social media platforms in the world is an incredible scoop, yet Breitbart Tech is one of the only publications covering the story so far. As of this writing, TechCrunch, The Verge, Mashable, CNET and Ars Technica have failed to cover the latest video. Ars Technica did publish a piece yesterday which took issue with some of the more innocuous statements from Veritas’ second video and attempted to discredit Project Veritas President James O’Keefe. This article did not deal with some of the larger pieces of information revealed by the second video but rather deconstructed smaller statements that many never questioned in the first place.

The silence is particularly deafening due to the content of the video, which focus on the alleged use and abuse of private user data — which should be an important topic to all tech journalists — as opposed to political speech.

James O’Keefe himself seemed to take note of the radio silence from the mainstream media, O’Keefe posted a tweet asking journalist Glen Greenwald of the Intercept if he was interested in covering the story. So far, Greenwald has not responded.

Hi @ggreenwald, given your news beat I thought you would care about this massive invasion of privacy and abuse of power at @Twitter. “Hundreds” of engineers storing, sharing and privately laughing about the collection of private pictures inside deleted DMs! pic.twitter.com/RDiYVjna2F

— James O'Keefe (@JamesOKeefeIII) January 15, 2018