Twitter Merging With X Corp Could Signal Greater Data Protection Concerns

If you’ve followed the whirlwind acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk then you remember not so long ago that he tweeted about Twitter becoming an everything app similar to China’s WeChat. A court filing from April 4th shows that Elon Musk’s X Corp. has officially absorbed Twitter Inc. in what we can only believe to be his first step towards creating the “everything app” he spoke about on Twitter. The acquisition, which took place on April 4, was uncovered in court documents from a lawsuit between Twitter and Laura Loomer.

Loomer, a right-wing provocateur, filed a lawsuit accusing Twitter of violating federal racketeering laws when it banned her account in 2019. Whether successful or not, Loomer’s suit is forcing Twitter, as a defendant, to submit corporate disclosure statements to the court. In its most recent, the company provided notice that “Twitter, Inc. has been merged into X Corp. and no longer exists,” and as the “successor in interest” X Corp. is now the defendant in Loomer’s suit. Its parent corporation is identified as X Holdings Corp, one of three holding companies established by Musk in April of 2022.

What’s Next For X?

It seems that for Musk, the letter X represents something far beyond just a letter of the alphabet. It embodies innovation, creativity, and the relentless pursuit of something greater. In 1999, he founded X.com, an online bank that later merged with another company and became PayPal. The letter X has since appeared in his other business ventures, including SpaceX, Tesla’s Model X car, three X Holdings corporations, and even the SEC-recognized name for the Twitter acquisition’s $13 billion bank loan, known as “Project X.” After successfully acquiring Twitter in October, Musk revealed that this purchase would “accelerate” the creation of an “everything app,” which would bear the name X, of course. …Insert Text Above

Despite the merger being kept under wraps and having no immediate impact on the app or service, it is a significant move from Musk. His vision of a “super app” includes a combination of messaging, social networking, and payment features similar to China’s WeChat, which boasts more than a billion users. Whether such an app can be successful in Western markets with the public’s growing awareness of privacy abuses and the government’s desire to reign those abuses in is still to be seen. Regardless, we can be certain that Twitter’s functionality, user base, and mass amounts of data would play a crucial role in making this mega-app a reality faster than if Musk had started from scratch.

It’s worth noting that the merger may be a strategic move to create a larger parent company named X to take control of all of Musk’s properties, including Tesla and SpaceX, and more. Perhaps X is meant to be more of an everything company, or holding company, than an everything app.

Underlying Privacy Concerns

For privacy professionals and individuals concerned about data, this move should spark concern. It’s common practice for companies to create holding companies to legally share data between entities without much oversight. In regards to Twitter’s current sharing behavior recent research from Duke University identified more than 57 percent of Twitter’s service providers as data brokers. Twitter’s Privacy Policy creates space for such behavior with its clause stating the company may share data “with our service providers that perform functions and provide services on our behalf”. In pair with Musk’s deprecation of Twitter’s Trust & Safety team in December of 2022, we should all be on high alert for even greater abuses than we’ve seen in the first six months of his reign.

Having watched Musk for more than a decade now the only thing we can be sure of is that we should expect a wild ride. In the near term, Twitter will remain fully operational as a social media platform but we should all keep an eye on new policies and practices as data may start flowing to places we never thought it would before.