1There's been a lot of fuss about Elon Musk disclosing emails from previous Twitter management about how the company dealt with data from Hunter Biden's laptop that was posted on Twitter. But it's worth pointing out how this is disastrous for both Twitter and Musk himself. /1

🔺 Musk is very publicly behaving as a partisan political actor – using Twitter to promote Republican causes explicitly. This might have been suspected of other social media bosses (e.g. Zuckerberg) but Musk is being absolutely open about it. /2

🔺 Dems will surely now regard Twitter as having been weaponised by an overt partisan actor – Musk will not get any favours from the Administration or Congress. Congressional hearings into Musk's moderation policies were already very likely and will surely be tougher now. /3

🔺 I've *never* previously seen a case of someone buying a company and publicly exposing its confidential internal and external communications for apparent political gain. That's a huge breach of confidence, which will have major adverse consequences for Musk and Twitter. /4

Twitter's previous management clearly didn't anticipate this, otherwise they would surely have insisted on a confidentiality clause. But nobody can now say they don't know how Musk will treat confidential information. /5

Who would now allow their company to be taken over by Musk, even if the payout is good? Anyone who does consent to a takeover would have to be concerned that Musk would expose their previous decisions to attack them and score partisan political points. /6

🔺 Relatedly, Musk has effectively doxxed a bunch of people, exposing them to death threats from MAGA crazies (see below). I expect this will lead to further resignations from Twitter – who would want to work for a boss who puts your life in danger? /7

🔺 Breaching confidence so casually and blatantly is going to concern a *lot* of people, governments and organisations worldwide, as @jsrailton points out here. Musk has just created a lot of dangerous exposure for himself, especially in the EU. /8

🔺 Musk is already signalling that he may carry out further breaches of confidence to advance partisan narratives outside the US. Expect governments around the world to react strongly if they see Twitter as now a hostile foreign actor (compare TikTok). /9

🔺 Advertisers are surely not going to be happy about this. Apart from the harm it does to brand safety, what does this say about their expectation of confidentiality from Twitter? General Motors has already said it's concerned about Twitter potentially leaking data to Tesla. /10

🔺 And it has big implications for us users too – the tweet below is particularly ominous. Our DMs are not encrypted and can be searched, read and harvested by Twitter's staff. A lot of bad things can be done with that data. /11

I fully expect that this is yet another poorly thought-out, spur of the moment initiative by Musk, but it's very likely to have seriously negative consequences for him and for Twitter. A door has been opened that won't easily be closed again. /end