Jack Dorsey eats five meals a week. He ends his evenings alternating between ice baths and 220-degree barrel saunas. He works almost solely from his iPhone, and unlike his counterpart at Facebook, he’s hardly a central physical presence at Twitter’s Market Street headquarters.
And all of this should come as no surprise after the galling Wednesday hack of top individual Twitter users, ranging from presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden and former boss Barack Obama to Kanye West and Elon Musk.
The incident served as a sort of black light to expose the failures of legacy media’s attempt to cover big tech and the broken narrative of who’s a hero or a villain in Silicon Valley. But more than anything, it served as a damning indictment of Twitter’s corporate culture and Dorsey’s ability to inculcate company loyalty and integrity.
Within minutes of the hack’s initiation, it was clear that it was the company, not individual users, being targeted. But rather than hacking third-party platforms to manipulate API vulnerabilities as a back door into the site, the hackers managed to break into the site directly, not through faulty code or malware, but likely through the betrayal of an employee within the company.
The practical implications of the hack (some $118,000 in profit for some bitcoin scammers) were immense. But more troubling is that Dorsey controls the direct messages, search histories, and third-party roaming data of world leaders, billionaire bosses, and every other normie (including you and me), but he can’t even keep his own house in order.
The media stupidly selected Mark Zuckerberg, second to Russian President Vladimir Putin, as the villain of the 2016 theft of Queen Hillary Clinton’s presidential coronation. Overnight, the Facebook boss was retconned into the Aaron Sorkin fictionalization of him in the Social Network — a bitter, sexist, Final Club reject with a chip on his shoulder from his college days taken out on the feminist hope of President Clinton II. No longer was he the benevolent boss for whom burnt-out BCG and McKinsey consultants chop off a limb to work, but instead a nefarious agent of the Bad Orange Man’s campaign of disinformation (that is, every presidential campaign in history).
But Facebook offers an interesting case study not just in the media’s abject failure to understand Silicon Valley, but also simply how a functional office responsible for such sensitive data works.
Chinese-owned TikTok has been in the news as of late, both for Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s warning that the ByteDance-owned video sharing platform is on the legal chopping block and also the app’s domestic defenders, even in light of emerging evidence that it collects user clipboard data accessible by the Chinese Communist Party, to whom it reports.
Beijing bootlickers stateside argue that because TikTok’s internal management and lobbyists are not literal agents of the CCP, your data is no less safe than on Facebook or LinkedIn servers. But as the Twitter breach demonstrates, there is already a complete void of moral compunction among staffers entrusted with the most sensitive of user management panels.
For all that the commentariat loves to hate on Zuckerberg, the fact remains that his company’s fiscal dedication to staffers (employees at Facebook’s Palo Alto headquarters get free everything from food to haircuts to bike repairs), his personal presence and engagement with even lower-level staff (Zuck’s physical makeup is one aspect that the Social Network actually got right), and a general culture of dedication to the mission statement makes it so that nearly all employees are emotionally loyal to the brand. Those who aren’t are either outed by Facebook’s stellar digital security or fellow staffers weary of traitors.
Twitter, and every other tech correspondent lamenting Facebook’s seeming cultishness, could learn a thing or two from company loyalty, especially when international relations and global markets are at stake.