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Comment by mimerme | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone else find it amazing that these days social media posts are becoming official government documentation? Who would've thought that the very platforms where we once just shared pictures of cats are starting to run our our elections and stock markets.

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Tesla made it easy for them. From the SEC filing:

> 13. On November 5, 2013, Tesla publicly filed a Form 8-K with the Commission stating that it intended to use Musk’s Twitter account as a means of announcing material information to the public about Tesla and its products and services and has encouraged investors to review the information about Tesla published by Musk via his Twitter account.

>Musk’s Twitter account as a means of announcing material information to the public about Tesla and its products and services

I do not understand why he did not hire a PR firm to run his Twitter given the high stakes of each of his tweets. This is really bad judgement on his part.

I had the exact same thought. Probably a lot of ego and hubris was involved.

Everyone should read the complaint and realize that everything you email and text will be found by the govt if they decide to investigate you.

Protonmail.

That might be technical protection, however the way the SEC gets access to mails is not on a technical level, but by sending out a letter "please send us all your mails on that topic" and if the response on such a request is not convincingly consistent you get into even more trouble.

This. At Toyota corporate, we had a meeting with a lawyer and the lawyer instructed in the event of an investigation (e.g. bad floor mats), provide all of the emails and documents. Make everything easily searchable, and keep emails for 3-4 years. People think that hiding evidence from your lawyer makes things better but according to the lawyer, it actually hurts the case by not being able to have information. So save everything! The Toyota I.T. department must’ve heard something different because outlook now erases all emails older than 90 days.

Your IT department probably is likely to follow a document retention policy relating to archiving emails (an archive you don't get access to).

Your document retention policy should be included in your onboarding training and accessible to all staff, not doing this would cause all kinds of compliance problems.

Protonmail is not located in the same jurisdiction as SEC, besides all they could eventually get is encrypted garbage.

The SEC is not going after protonmail, but your company. They use legal powers against you. They don't care about technicalities. (Except on the delivery channel for the Gigabytes of data) If you don't comply, they put charges on you.

I think it's odd that these powerful technologies are not taken more seriously and incorporated into society more quickly. It just shows how slowly society thinks and adjusts.

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