by Chavi Mehta
Aug 23 (Reuters) – Twitter misled U.S. regulators about its ability to defend itself against hackers and spam accounts, according to a whistleblower complaint.
The social network’s former chief security officer, Peiter Zatko, said in his complaint that Twitter wrongly claimed to have a strong security plan.
The complaint was filed last month with the US financial market regulator, the Department of Justice, and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).
Twitter would have favored the increase in the number of users instead of the fight against spam accounts, according to the document.
These accusations come as Twitter has brought a lawsuit against Elon Musk for breach of the social network takeover contract for 44 billion dollars (44 billion euros).
The boss of Tesla terminated the agreement to buy Twitter in early July, accusing the group of having breached its contractual obligations by providing in particular erroneous or incomplete data on the number of false accounts, accusations rejected by the social network.
(Report Chavi Mehta, Ankur Banerjee, Tiyashi Datta, Peter Henderson and Raphael Satter, with contributions from Rick Cowan, writing by Ankur Banerjee; French version Camille Raynaud)