In Our Inbox: Hundreds Of Confidential Twitter Documents

Here’s a dilemma: The guy (“Hacker Croll”) who claims to have accessed hundreds of confidential corporate and personal documents of Twitter and Twitter employees, is releasing those documents publicly and sent them to us earlier today. The zip file contained 310 documents, ranging from executive meeting notes, partner agreements and financial projections to the meal preferences, calendars and phone logs of various Twitter employees.

We’ve spent most of the evening reading these documents. The vast majority of them are somewhat embarrassing to various individuals, but not otherwise interesting. An example – there are a number of documents showing the names of people who interviewed at Twitter for various senior level positions so publishing their names would obviously be distressing for them. Most of these people remain in their current jobs. Some documents show floorplans and security passcodes to get into the Twitter offices. We’re not going to post any of those documents.

But we are going to release some of the documents showing financial projections, product plans and notes from executive strategy meetings. We’re also going to post the original pitch document for the Twitter TV show that hit the news in May, mostly because it’s awesome.

There is clearly an ethical line here that we don’t want to cross, and the vast majority of these documents aren’t going to be published, at least by us. But a few of the documents have so much news value that we think it’s appropriate to publish them.

More posts coming soon.

Update: Our Reaction To Your Reactions To the Twitter Confidential Documents Post

Update 2: Final Tweet: The Twitter Reality TV Show Pitch

Update 3: Twitter’s Financial Forecast Shows First Revenue In Q3, 1 billion users in 2013

Update 4: Twitter’s Internal Strategy Laid Bare: To Be “The Pulse Of The Planet”