[teruakohatu]

Employees at Twitter would go to jail if they used Twitters information to trade. Journalists have gone to jail for sharing information about stories they are writing to third parties.

But it is possibly legal for Twitter the organisation to do that or sell tweet "firehoses" to third parties.

I would not be surprised if they had deal with with traders that gave them a firehose of tweets milliseconds before everyone else.

There was an interesting case in the UK where a company that provided the audio feed for the Bank of England announcements fed the feed to hedge funds before everyone else heard it.

https://news.sky.com/story/bank-of-england-cuts-audio-feed-o...

Edit: this is my uneducated opinion not legal advice.

[tptacek]

They would? Are you sure about this? Can you cite an authority on it? I don't know either way, except that I know from years of reading Matt Levine that the laws on insider trading are a lot more complicated than you'd assume.

[teruakohatu]

I love Matt's views on the subject. At its core, as I understand it, the issue is who owns the information, and is Twitter licensed to distribute it as they see fit.

https://www.quora.com/Securities-Law-Is-it-legal-for-a-journ...

[stanfordkid]

I agree that a citation is needed ;)

But in this case I think the case history points to OP being right, though you'd likely have to have a pretty egregious and clear pattern of such activity, and it would have to be deemed material information:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-sec-capitalone-insidertra...

[tptacek]

The Vitaly Korchevsky indictment probably comes close to demonstrating a model of what this would look like:

https://www.justice.gov/usao-nj/file/765216/download

[jameshart]

That Bank of England case seems to have been handled as a breach of the terms of the contract between the Bank and the supplier, not as a criminal matter. The referral to the Financial Conduct Authority might suggest that the hedge funds that purchased access to the feed might have breached some regulations by using a service whose existence was not sanctioned by the Bank... but it's definitely not clear to me that any of the same sort of relationships as exist between the BoE, regulated hedge funds, and a tech company with a supply contract with the Bank, also exist in any meaningful way between Elon Musk, Twitter, and Tesla...