Twitter makes NO guarantees that they will deliver every tweet to all consumers simultaneously, or even at all. They don't guarantee they won't hold the tweet up while they decide how to process it - they certainly analyze tweets for content and automatically hold some for manual review, for example. So why on earth couldn't they accept the tweet, process the information in it, and make corporate decisions about how to, say, adjust their investment portfolio... before they put the tweet's contents out on the wire for the world? Is there anything in the ToS that says they can't act on the contents of tweets you send them? You shared the information with Twitter with the intent of publishing it to your followers - but the agent you handed the information to first was Twitter.
There's a sci-fi black mirror kind of scenario in there, too... It's quite possible that if the president of the US were to declare war, the first place that information would reach outside the White House and Pentagon would be a Twitter HTTP service.
Think about the responsibility the software that has to handle, route, and process that request bears. Think about the threat model the systems that software is part of need to consider, if that really is potentially one way it could be used.
Worse still, it might not even be the 'send tweet' handler that gets notice first; the twitter client into which the message is being typed, sending back analytic data to help optimize its autocomplete suggestions or pushing data to the server so it will be ready to offer an appropriate gif to accompany the tweet, might be sending back the draft text of the announcement before the president hits 'Send'.
So here's your story writing prompt:
A Twitter engineer reviewing logs trying to track down a bug in the gif autosuggest algorithm chances across a series of requests from the president's iPhone in the last two minutes, containing text from a tweet being composed, that look for all the world like the drafting and redrafting of an announcement that the country is at war...
IANAL, but it strikes me as 100% illegal for Twitter to trade on their tweets before they are released (at least for the class of tweets which contain corporate announcements - tweets from e.g. the persident might be treated differently).
Some of those tweets can be resonably be construed as being MNPI, so trading on it before it's published on the platform is most likely illegal.
Can newspapers/journalists trade on a piece of news before they break it?
Block the tweet? It's like the USSR guy who decided that the early warning signal was incorrect, and prevented WW3.
This idea of unilateral "freedom of speech" is beyond goofy - some actions that deliberately cause massive amounts of distress, even in the short-term, must be attenuated in some manner.
I don't know if it's explicitly part of the regulations but as a former "insider" at a large publicly traded valley tech company, I can say that it's almost certainly against the rather all-encompassing wording of the shit I had to sign that enumerated all the "Thou Shalt Nots" from the regs (as well as watch the insufferably annoying 'compliance training' videos (with interactive quizzes!)
Basically, it went far beyond all information about my employer to include ANY "non-public information" about any OTHER company that I might become aware of through my employment, whether directly or indirectly, including (but not limited to) any product plans, business strategies, etc (or lack thereof), I was prohibited from trading on or disclosing to any other person, yada, yada, yada.
Since I had, at least, theoretical access to tons of customer data on our servers as well as forecasts based future contract negotiations with our many thousands of huge public co customers... per my attorney's advice, I just held all my company RSUs and put the rest of my portfolio on auto-pilot in a Boggle-headish standard blend of cheap ETFs and never traded any individual stocks. This happened to work out extremely well for me financially as well as simplifying my life and reducing my exposure to lawsuits and regulator scrutiny. It was a combo of luck and the fact that for ten-year time periods, that strategy is actually pretty good.
The rules that govern what individual employees are allowed to do privately with the information they come across in the course of their work which belongs to their employer are very different to the rules that govern what the company itself is allowed to do with the information it has access to.
Of course you couldn't personally beneficially trade on information you accessed in the course of your employment (although primarily that would be a breach of your employment terms, not necessarily a breach of the law...)
But that says nothing whatsoever about what you can do with that information to benefit the company.
Employees at Twitter would go to jail if they used Twitters information to trade. Journalists have gone to jail for sharing information about stories they are writing to third parties.
But it is possibly legal for Twitter the organisation to do that or sell tweet "firehoses" to third parties.
I would not be surprised if they had deal with with traders that gave them a firehose of tweets milliseconds before everyone else.
There was an interesting case in the UK where a company that provided the audio feed for the Bank of England announcements fed the feed to hedge funds before everyone else heard it.
They would? Are you sure about this? Can you cite an authority on it? I don't know either way, except that I know from years of reading Matt Levine that the laws on insider trading are a lot more complicated than you'd assume.
That Bank of England case seems to have been handled as a breach of the terms of the contract between the Bank and the supplier, not as a criminal matter. The referral to the Financial Conduct Authority might suggest that the hedge funds that purchased access to the feed might have breached some regulations by using a service whose existence was not sanctioned by the Bank... but it's definitely not clear to me that any of the same sort of relationships as exist between the BoE, regulated hedge funds, and a tech company with a supply contract with the Bank, also exist in any meaningful way between Elon Musk, Twitter, and Tesla...
This is, in fact, the exact opposite of insider trading.
No one working at Twitter is also working at Tesla. Ergo, no insiders.
Anything that Elon sends to Twitter is instantly considered public knowledge and its data belongs to Twitter. If they delay his tweets to make trades that's well within their rights.
Arguably the information is not public until it is available to more than just twitter employees. And trading on non public info can be securities fraud.
jameshart|5 years ago
Twitter makes NO guarantees that they will deliver every tweet to all consumers simultaneously, or even at all. They don't guarantee they won't hold the tweet up while they decide how to process it - they certainly analyze tweets for content and automatically hold some for manual review, for example. So why on earth couldn't they accept the tweet, process the information in it, and make corporate decisions about how to, say, adjust their investment portfolio... before they put the tweet's contents out on the wire for the world? Is there anything in the ToS that says they can't act on the contents of tweets you send them? You shared the information with Twitter with the intent of publishing it to your followers - but the agent you handed the information to first was Twitter.
There's a sci-fi black mirror kind of scenario in there, too... It's quite possible that if the president of the US were to declare war, the first place that information would reach outside the White House and Pentagon would be a Twitter HTTP service.
Think about the responsibility the software that has to handle, route, and process that request bears. Think about the threat model the systems that software is part of need to consider, if that really is potentially one way it could be used.
Worse still, it might not even be the 'send tweet' handler that gets notice first; the twitter client into which the message is being typed, sending back analytic data to help optimize its autocomplete suggestions or pushing data to the server so it will be ready to offer an appropriate gif to accompany the tweet, might be sending back the draft text of the announcement before the president hits 'Send'.
So here's your story writing prompt:
A Twitter engineer reviewing logs trying to track down a bug in the gif autosuggest algorithm chances across a series of requests from the president's iPhone in the last two minutes, containing text from a tweet being composed, that look for all the world like the drafting and redrafting of an announcement that the country is at war...
What does Twitter do?
maest|5 years ago
Some of those tweets can be resonably be construed as being MNPI, so trading on it before it's published on the platform is most likely illegal.
Can newspapers/journalists trade on a piece of news before they break it?
rdruxn|5 years ago
arthurcolle|5 years ago
This idea of unilateral "freedom of speech" is beyond goofy - some actions that deliberately cause massive amounts of distress, even in the short-term, must be attenuated in some manner.
mrandish|5 years ago
Basically, it went far beyond all information about my employer to include ANY "non-public information" about any OTHER company that I might become aware of through my employment, whether directly or indirectly, including (but not limited to) any product plans, business strategies, etc (or lack thereof), I was prohibited from trading on or disclosing to any other person, yada, yada, yada.
Since I had, at least, theoretical access to tons of customer data on our servers as well as forecasts based future contract negotiations with our many thousands of huge public co customers... per my attorney's advice, I just held all my company RSUs and put the rest of my portfolio on auto-pilot in a Boggle-headish standard blend of cheap ETFs and never traded any individual stocks. This happened to work out extremely well for me financially as well as simplifying my life and reducing my exposure to lawsuits and regulator scrutiny. It was a combo of luck and the fact that for ten-year time periods, that strategy is actually pretty good.
jameshart|5 years ago
Of course you couldn't personally beneficially trade on information you accessed in the course of your employment (although primarily that would be a breach of your employment terms, not necessarily a breach of the law...)
But that says nothing whatsoever about what you can do with that information to benefit the company.
netsharc|5 years ago
[deleted]
teruakohatu|5 years ago
But it is possibly legal for Twitter the organisation to do that or sell tweet "firehoses" to third parties.
I would not be surprised if they had deal with with traders that gave them a firehose of tweets milliseconds before everyone else.
There was an interesting case in the UK where a company that provided the audio feed for the Bank of England announcements fed the feed to hedge funds before everyone else heard it.
https://news.sky.com/story/bank-of-england-cuts-audio-feed-o...
Edit: this is my uneducated opinion not legal advice.
tptacek|5 years ago
jameshart|5 years ago
unknown|5 years ago
[deleted]
DarthGhandi|5 years ago
You could make some pretty big moves just with a dramatic headline and a buried lede
siruncledrew|5 years ago
p1necone|5 years ago
sjg007|5 years ago
bananabreakfast|5 years ago
No one working at Twitter is also working at Tesla. Ergo, no insiders.
Anything that Elon sends to Twitter is instantly considered public knowledge and its data belongs to Twitter. If they delay his tweets to make trades that's well within their rights.
gnopgnip|5 years ago