[shawnz]

What makes that explanation more likely than the other? Imagine there was no optics problem here, and it was just a highly publicized tweet of some internal comms with no PR consequences, it would still obviously need to be removed, right?

[maxbond]

That's not obvious to me, no. What I'd imagine is something like this being escalated, and that there would be reasonable cases to be made either way; that all internal information should be removed on principle, and that removing this tweet would harm the company without improving it's security posture. Twitter has historically been pretty reluctant to remove tweets, so I wouldn't be surprised if, under normal circumstances, they ended up keeping it up. But I wouldn't be surprised the other way either.

But closing our eyes to the optics of the situation would be a mistake. These are not normal circumstances by a long shot. Given the turmoil Twitter is going through and the heavy handed approach the new management is employing, it seems likely to me that very little work is being done through the normal channels (who's to say there's even someone on the other side of that channel?), while much is being done by direct instruction from the new management.