The Twitter Whistleblower

On October 28, 2022, the Securities and Exchange Commission confirmed that Elon Musk had finally completed his $44 billion takeover of Twitter.

Twitter earns most of its revenue in two ways. The first is data licensing, where it sells subscriptions to public data to companies and developers, allowing better insights in real-time and historically about platform trends and user demographics. Secondly, through good old-fashioned digital advertising, companies are able to place their ads throughout Twitter's feed.

Back in April 2022, Twitter adopted a limited-duration shareholder rights plan. Known informally as a "poison pill", such a plan is often used to fend off potentially hostile takeover bids by diluting the stake of the entity that intends to complete the takeover. In simpler terms, Twitter's board tried to increase the number of Twitter shares to ensure Elon Musk would not have the necessary majority number of shares to complete his hostile takeover.

Like any tech company, Twitter has the mechanisms to know a great deal about its users. Firstly, there’s the information a user willfully provides Twitter when setting up their profile, such as location, language, and name. Then, since Twitter has access to a user’s IP address, it can triangulate a user’s location, sometimes in real time. Twitter’s own privacy policy states that a user’s tweets or interactions are available to third parties via programming interfaces. Using this information, advertisers can piece together a portrait of a person’s political leanings and consumer behavior, thus targeting them more effectively with ads and content more likely to get their engagement.

Any publicly available data can be scraped from Twitter. Additionally, any data that can be accessed, viewed and downloaded without needing a Twitter account can be scraped off.

In short, yes. Twitter has access to the IP address when you connect to the WiFi at your home or office. Using this information, an individual’s Twitter account can be traced to the person to whom the account belongs.