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(NEW YORK) — Facebook users who had an account at any time from May 2007 to the end of last year can now apply for their share of a $725 million privacy settlement that the platform’s parent company, Meta, agreed to last December.

In a 2018 lawsuit, Facebook was accused of improperly sharing the personal information of 87 million users with third-party advertisers, including Cambridge Analytica, the data firm linked to then-candidate Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.

Meta denies any liability or wrongdoing, but is agreeing to pay out the large settlement to users whose information may have been comprised during that time. ABC News Radio anchor Michelle Franzen spoke to ABC News correspondent Alexis Christoforous on START HERE to discuss the case’s background and how people can apply for their claim online at facebookuserprivacysettlement.com.

MICHELLE FRANZEN: Alexis, first of all, jog our collective memories on this lawsuit and how it impacted Facebook users at the time.

ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: So, you know, Michelle, this was quite a few years ago now. This lawsuit was filed in 2018 after Facebook disclosed that the information of 87 million users was improperly shared with third-party advertisers, data brokers, namely Cambridge Analytica. That is the political consultant that was used by the presidential campaign of Donald Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz, among others. So in coming to this settlement, you know, Meta, which is the Facebook parent company, denies any liability or wrongdoing, but they are agreeing to pay out $725 million to users whose information may have been compromised during that time.

FRANZEN: So how much money could users receive and what do you have to do if you were a Facebook user to see if you’re due some sort of settlement money?

CHRISTOFOROUS: Well, I think we all hear $725 million and our ears perk up because that sounds like a lot of money. But the fact is, when you divvy it up amongst millions and millions of people, it’s not that much money anymore. So the amount of money that you might get from this claim is still unknown, because it’s going to depend on a couple of things: How many people actually submit a claim and then how long you had your Facebook account for given the years that, you know, make you eligible.

So I guess we should let folks know that you’re only eligible if you had an active Facebook account sometime between May of 2007 and December of 2022. You don’t have to have had it for all that time, just some of that time. You have until August 25 to submit a claim. You can do that right online. You have to go to a website. It’s facebookuserprivacysettlement.com. It’s long. You have to write it all out. Again, don’t expect the money super soon. It has to get final approval from a judge in early September. But at some point at the end of this year or next, your money should be coming to you.

FRANZEN: That span of time listed was during the height of Facebook, right?

CHRISTOFOROUS: It was, so, I mean, you would imagine that, you know, many, many millions of people, tens of millions of people. I mean, according to Facebook, its 87 million users had their information improperly shared with these third parties. So many millions of people could claim this money. And so the more people that tried to claim it, the less amount you would get. I mean, if all 87 million people tried to get a piece of the pie, you know, you’d probably walk away with about $8. But you know what, Michelle? That’s $8 you wouldn’t have had if you didn’t file the claim. That’s how I look at it.

FRANZEN: Exactly. That’s what Twitter is asking for for a month.

CHRISTOFOROUS: Exactly, exactly. So, you know, it’s also, I think the principle of the thing for lots of folks, they feel like, you know, you can’t just go willy-nilly and use my information without my consent, and these are privacy violations and so I want what’s coming to me.

FRANZEN: And those privacy violations that resulted in the CEO and the founder of Facebook and Meta, Mark Zuckerberg, having to go to Congress and testify.

CHRISTOFOROUS: That’s right. That was quite the media circus when Zuckerberg went before lawmakers to really defend his company. But, you know, again, with this settlement, they’re not admitting any wrongdoing, but it is their way to sort of, I guess, put a period at the end of this scandalous time for Facebook.

FRANZEN: And Alexis, this is a pretty big settlement, nearly as big as the $787.5 million dollars that Fox News just agreed to settle in a lawsuit by Dominion Voting Systems. Of course, Dominion alleging Fox knowingly pushed false claims about its voting machines during the 2020 election. What do these settlements signal as we turn the corner to the next general election?

CHRISTOFOROUS: Well, I think it tells us that, you know, people are a lot smarter this time around. I think they are much more careful about their personal information and they’re much more caged about how they’re going to let other entities use their personal information.

For companies like Meta, for companies like Fox, I mean, these sound like huge numbers, but when you look at the revenue that flows into these companies, I would imagine for them and their legal teams, they think that this is, you know, sort of the most prudent thing they can do is to settle for what seems like eye-popping amounts of money.

But for sure, I mean, I think privacy, integrity, I mean, these are going to be things that are going to be top of mind for voters in the upcoming election.

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(NEW YORK) — Twitter on Thursday began removing blue check marks from legacy verified accounts.

Elon Musk, the CEO of the social media platform, had announced earlier this month that the checks marks would be taken down on April 20.

Final date for removing legacy Blue checks is 4/20

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 11, 2023

The blue check marks were used to make sure that accounts of notable people or organizations were actually being run by those people or groups.

Now, the verification symbol is going to cost users $8 a month.

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(NEW YORK) — High inflation, interest rate hikes and recession worries pummeled stocks last year.

The market has rebounded in 2023, though, even as each of those problems continues to vex the economy. Compounding those concerns, the banking sector underwent a crisis last month and a debt ceiling dispute in Congress risks financial distress.

Still, the tech-heavy Nasdaq has climbed more than 15% this year, while the S&P 500 has jumped more than 7%. The Dow has ticked up about 2% since the outset of the year.

The gains in recent months owe in part to the poor performance last year, since investors already responded to the grim economic conditions with a sell-off, stock analysts told ABC News.

Investors flocked back to the market as inflation eased and rate hikes slowed, even if those market headwinds persist and the threat of a recession looms, they said.

“The stock market is obviously performing better than the vast majority of people would’ve expected,” Tom Essaye, president of financial data firm Sevens Report Research, told ABC News.

“The market has proven very impressively resilient, despite bad news,” he added.

Analysts differed about the outlook for stocks going forward, however, as some said they expect the rally to endure for the remainder of the year while others predicted a recession that would render the good times short-lived.

Over the last year, the Federal Reserve has imposed an aggressive string of interest rate hikes last seen in the 1980s.

The policy aims to slash inflation but risks slowing the economy and bringing about a recession.

So far, the approach has succeeded in cooling price hikes but fallen short of the Fed’s goal.

Consumer prices rose 5% last month compared to a year ago, extending a monthslong slowdown of price increases but leaving inflation more than double the target rate of 2%.

The progress in slashing inflation has left investors confident that the Fed will soon stop raising interest rates and may even begin to lower rates by the end of the year, analysts told ABC News.

“The theme we’re seeing in 2023 is ‘The end is near,'” Adam Turnquist, chief technical strategist at LPL Financial, told ABC News.

Softening inflation and rate hikes have coincided with resilient economic performance, fueling investor optimism, analysts said.

The U.S. added 236,000 jobs in March, which marks robust job growth but a reduction from an average of 334,000 jobs added each month over the previous six months, according to government data released last week.

Meanwhile, U.S. retail sales fell moderately in February but remained solid, suggesting that households still retain some pandemic-era savings.

When asked about rising stock prices this year, Tigress Financial market analyst Ivan Feinseth said: “The key fundamental reason is the economy is still strong. The world hasn’t come to an end.”

Still, the economy remains under threat of a recession.

Fed economists said in March that they anticipate a “mild” recession later this year, escalating a previous forecast, central bank meeting minutes showed.

Sixty-five percent of economists expect a recession within the next year, according to a Bloomberg survey last month.

Still, many stock investors hold out hope that the economy could avert a downturn or expect that a mild recession would cause little economic upheaval, said Turnquist, of LPL Financial.

“We’re seeing a message from the market that we could still potentially avoid a recession,” he said.

Some analysts said each of the major stock indexes would end the year at a higher price than its current level, since resilient economic activity would buoy corporate profits, the key focus for stock forecasters.

“The market is teetering on a major breakout,” said Feinseth, of Tigress Financial. “I think we’re going to see a powerful second half of the year.”

Essaye, of Sevens Report Research, offered a more pessimistic outlook, saying the S&P 500 could fall as much as 10% by the end of the year if the economy turns downward.

“It’s extremely difficult to execute a soft landing,” he said, referring to an outcome in which the Fed raises rates to bring down inflation but avoids causing a recession. “There has only been one executed successfully in the last 40 years.”

Despite the glum forecast, Essaye said the current moment offers an opportunity for patient investors to jump into the market.

“We’re pricing in the bad news now and getting ready for a positive surprise in the long term,” he said. “The U.S. economy isn’t going to break.”

ABC News’ Elizabeth Schulze contributed to this report.

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(NEW YORK) — Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk announced plans this week to create an AI-driven conversation tool called “TruthGPT,” after criticizing the popular AI text bot ChatGPT for being “politically correct.”

“There’s certainly a path to AI dystopia, which is to train AI to be deceptive,” Musk, the CEO of Tesla and owner of Twitter, cautioned in an interview with Fox News host Tucker Carlson on Monday.

AI chatbots pose significant risks centered on political bias, since the models can generate vast amounts of speech, potentially shaping public opinion and enabling the spread of misinformation, experts told ABC News.

However, the comments from Musk underscore the fraught challenge raised by the issue, because content moderation itself has become a polarizing topic and Musk has voiced opinions that place his approach within that hot-button political context, some experts added.

“Musk is correct that if we can’t solve the truthfulness problem and the reliability problem, that poses a risk for AI safety,” Gary Marcus, a professor emeritus of psychology and neuroscience at New York University, who specializes in AI, told ABC News.

“But tying that question to political correctness might actually be a mistake,” he added. “You have to separate the truth from the politics if you want to be credible on the truth issue. It’s a mistake to try to tie the two together.”

Created by artificial intelligence firm OpenAI, ChatGPT is a chatbot — a computer program that converses with human users.

Neither Musk nor OpenAI responded to a request for comment from ABC News.

ChatGPT uses an algorithm that selects words based on lessons learned from scanning billions of pieces of text across the internet. The tool has gained popularity for viral posts that demonstrate it composing Shakespearean poetry or identifying bugs in computer code.

But the technology has also stoked controversy with some troubling results. The designers of ChatGPT programmed safeguards that prevent it from taking up controversial opinions or expressing hate speech.

Content moderation on AI poses legitimate challenges for designers, who must determine which messages are sufficiently offensive or odious to warrant intervention, experts told ABC News.

“If a product is being used by millions of people, safeguards are something the designers have to put in place,” Ruslan Salakhutdinov, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, told ABC News.

“The question is: How do you make it fair or neutral? That’s a little bit of a judgment of the designers,” he added. “You could imagine a GPT that’s politically biased.”

Further, the responses from AI conversation tools depend heavily on the text with which the model is trained, Kathleen Carley, another professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University.

“There’s this view that the majority of information that it was trained on is more left-leaning and has certain political biases and certain political agendas built into it,” Carley said. “That’s where that argument is coming from.”

Musk, who co-founded OpenAI but left the organization in 2018, in a December tweet accused OpenAI of “training AI to be woke.”

While AI chatbots deserve scrutiny over political bias, Musk stands as an imperfect spokesperson for such criticism because of his own high-profile political views, some experts said.

Musk has taken up a slew of conservative stances in recent months, including an expression of support for Republican candidates in the midterm elections last year and repeated criticism of “woke” politics.

“I think what he means by ‘truth’ is ‘agrees with me,'” Oren Etzioni, CEO of Allen Institute for AI and a computer science professor at the University of Washington, told ABC News.

Still, the polarized political environment poses a challenge for any AI chatbot developer attempting to moderate responses, experts said.

“Politics as it exists today doesn’t draw lines that finely,” Eliezer Yudkowsky, a decision theorist at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, told ABC News. “You would have to know where to draw the line in a sensible place to get AI to draw the line in a sensible place.”

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(SAN FRANCISCO) — Facebook-parent Meta began laying off workers on Wednesday as part of its latest round of job cuts announced in March, the company confirmed to ABC News.

Last month, CEO Mark Zuckerberg released plans for 10,000 job cuts over April and May, as part of what Zuckerberg described as the company’s “Year of Efficiency.”

“This will be tough and there’s no way around that,” Zuckerberg said in March, forecasting job cuts for technical workers in April and enterprise employees in May.

“My hope is to make these org changes as soon as possible in the year so we can get past this period of uncertainty and focus on the critical work ahead,” Zuckerberg added.

The personnel changes at Meta include the closure of 5,000 additional open roles that the company hadn’t hired, Zuckerberg said.

Meta has faced challenges in recent months as the company contends with a widespread drop in online ad spending and rising competition from TikTok.

The company’s shares fell 64% last year but have recovered a significant portion of those losses this year amid cost-cutting measures.

Sales at top tech firms, including Facebook, have retreated from the blistering pace attained during the pandemic, when billions across the world were forced into isolation.

Customers stuck at home came to rely on delivery services like e-commerce and virtual connections formed through social media

In turn, companies across the tech industry have announced layoffs this year affecting tens of thousands of workers.

In early January, Amazon announced plans to eliminate just over 18,000 roles, including layoffs that had been announced in November.

Alphabet Inc., the parent company of Google, said in January that it would cut roughly 12,000 jobs from its global workforce.

Meta drew criticism last year from some investors over its large investment in its metaverse project, which has yet to deliver significant returns.

Brad Gerstner, whose fund Altimeter Capital holds hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Meta stock, sharply criticized the company’s strategy in an open letter in October.

“Meta has drifted into the land of excess – too many people, too many ideas, too little urgency,” Gerstner wrote.

Meta’s most recent quarterly earnings report, reflecting a three-month period ending in December, recorded a third-consecutive quarter of falling revenue but exceeded analyst expectations.

The company reported 2 billion daily active users — a figure that also surpassed expectations.

“There’s going to be some more we can do to improve our productivity, speed and cost structure,” Zuckerberg said on the earnings call in February.

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(WASHINGTON) — The Justice Department on Tuesday charged a Hezbollah financier and eight others with evading sanctions and laundering almost $160 million, in some cases through artwork and diamonds.

Prosecutors alleged that Nazem Ahmad continued to acquire high-level artwork and diamonds through U.S. entities and provided access to international financial markets to a terrorist organization.

Ahmad was also an associate of high-level members of Hezbollah, a Lebanon-based terrorist group that was designated by the United States as a Foreign Terrorist Organization and Specially Designated Global Terrorist, the Justice Department said.

He was also sanctioned by the Treasury Department in 2019, barring him from doing any business in the United States.

At a news conference on Tuesday, senior leaders from the Department of Homeland Security, Department of Commerce, Treasury and State made clear they want him captured, even offering a $10 million reward for his capture.

“Ahmad and his network used a complex web of unlawful business entities to buy valuable artwork and secure U.S. based diamond grading service all while hiding their involvement in and benefit from these activities to the tune of approximately $160 million, while also providing the terrorist organization Hizballah access to U.S. and international financial markets,” Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security John Tien told reporters.

Court documents allege that Ahmad used a U.S.-based diamond-grading service to affect the sales price of certain diamonds he would allegedly give to have serviced. He also obtained artwork after he was sanctioned in 2019 valued at more than $450,000, prosecutors said, while an additional $780,000 in artwork from U.S. persons located outside the United States was also acquired in violation of terrorism sanctions.

“The defendants and other conspirators engaged in this scheme to benefit Ahmad and themselves while at the same time evading terrorism-related sanctions, to avoid the payment of taxes to foreign governments on the import of valuable goods into foreign countries, and to make it more difficult for the United States government to carry out its lawful functions,” a press release from the Justice Department said.

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(NEW YORK) — It’s the end of an era.

Netflix announced Tuesday that it would be sending its last red envelope on Sept. 29, 2023, ending its DVD mailing service after 25 years.

“Our goal has always been to provide the best service for our members but as the business continues to shrink that’s going to become increasingly difficult,” the company said in part of a statement shared with ABC News.

The now-ubiquitous streaming company began sending rented DVDs by mail in April 1998. Nearly a decade after its first disc was shipped out in a red envelope (that movie was Beetlejuice, by the way), the company introduced its online streaming and video service in 2007.

Since then, Netflix says it has sent over 5.2 billion mailer DVDs and accrued more than 230 million paid memberships for its streaming services. The company is currently valued at around $150 billion.

The move comes as the streaming giant continues to make its foray into producing and investing in original content. In March, Netflix won six major Oscars at the 95th Academy Awards, including best international feature for All Quiet on the Western Front and best animated feature film for Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio.

“We feel so privileged to have been able to share movie nights with our DVD members for so long, so proud of what our employees achieved and excited to continue pleasing entertainment fans for many more decades to come,” the company said in a statement on Tuesday, in part.

Netflix released its Q1 earnings report on April 18 at 6 p.m. ET.

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(LOS ANGELES) — Hollywood writers are calling on the studios to show them the money.

Thousands of television and movie writers voted overwhelmingly to authorize a strike when their contracts run out on May 1, unions representing the writers said on Monday.

The move sets TV creators on a collision course with the major studios as an industry-wide shift to streaming reorients the way shows are made and monetized.

Meanwhile, a strike would carry implications for millions of viewers, immediately disrupting some shows and delaying the development of others.

Here’s what to know about the impending strike, how a previous labor dispute played out and what it all means for TV offerings:

Why are Hollywood writers threatening to strike?

The contract dispute follows a decade-long shift to streaming that has slashed writer pay and worsened working conditions, the unions, which belong to East and West Coast branches of the Writers Guild of America, said in a statement.

Before the emergence of streaming, a studio typically ordered between 13 and 22 episodes for a season of television, allowing writers to work on a given project for as many as 40 weeks, Justin Halpern, a showrunner on “Abbott Elementary” and a union member, told ABC News.

Currently, studios order as few as six episodes, forcing writers to string together multiple projects and depend on savings in between jobs, he added.

“It’s becoming just a gig economy,” said Halpern, who has written for television for nearly 15 years.

“There’s a misconception in the world that writers are this really rich group of people who all drive BMWs and send their kids to private schools,” he added. “A lot of our members can’t even pay their rent.”

The proliferation of shows has also given rise to an industry practice known as the “mini-room,” in which a studio assembles a small group of writers to create a show before it gets greenlit.

Studios often pay the minimum permissible for work in mini-rooms, but oftentimes a production company lets go of some of the writers even if a show moves forward, leaving them cut out of additional pay as the show moves toward completion, Halpern said.

“Pay us a premium for being in these rooms because that’s the hardest work to do as a writer,” Halpern said.

The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, or AMPTP, which negotiates on behalf of TV and movie production companies, told ABC News in a statement that the strike vote amounts to a bargaining tactic.

“A strike authorization vote has always been part of the WGA’s plan, announced before the parties even exchanged proposals,” the group said. “Its inevitable ratification should come as no surprise to anyone.”

“Our goal is, and continues to be, to reach a fair and reasonable agreement,” the AMPTP added.

What happened the last time Hollywood writers went on strike?

The last time Hollywood writers authorized a strike, in 2017, the two sides reached a final-hour agreement that averted a work stoppage.

The most recent full-fledged strike, however, took place in 2007 and lasted 100 days, costing the California economy an estimated $2.1 billion.

Halpern said he hopes the writers avoid a strike this time around but he has “no idea” how long a potential strike could last.

“It’s up to our membership and it’s up to the studios,” he said.

What would a strike mean for what’s on TV?

A strike would immediately disrupt some daily programs that depend on writing staff, such as late shows.

It would also delay the development of scripted TV, potentially pushing back the release of new shows or forthcoming seasons of longstanding programs.

“The writers would stop work,” Halpern said. “Pencils down.”

“It would halt production on a lot of your favorite shows,” he added. “But I would hope that people understand that this is a labor action.”

Disney is the parent company of ABC News.

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(NEW YORK) — McDonald’s burgers have been an American classic since 1955.

Now, the iconic fast food chain is planning some changes, including how they cook their quintessential burgers.

For their signature Big Mac, McDouble, cheeseburger and hamburger, McDonald’s is promising softer buns, caramelized patties cooked with white onions on the grill, cheese slices that melt more and even an extra special sauce.

McDonald’s claims the improvements are so good even the Hamburgler is coming out of retirement to steal a bite.

The updated menu items have already been rolling out in restaurants along the West Coast, according to McDonald’s, and a few lucky ABC staffers and their families stopped by the Golden Arches in Los Angeles for a taste test.

Staffers agreed the food was indeed “very saucy” and “very cheesy” and one staffer’s young daughter added, “Yeah, very good!”

The McDonald’s changes are coming at a time when the burger business is heating up and McDonald’s continues to hang on to its market shares amid competition from other popular chains like Shake Shack, In-N-Out Burger and Five Guys.

Business experts like strategist Kathleen Griffith said these tweaks may help McDonald’s keep up with its rivals.

“Being that burger that people know, pulling out the original mascots, that sort of strategy is never going to get you into trouble when you work on driving a consistent customer experience. It’s a good recipe,” Griffith said.

The rolling launch is anticipated to be completed by 2024 and while McDonald’s is not planning to increase prices for these burgers, some individual franchises may update prices.

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(NEW YORK) — The leak of dozens of highly classified documents on the social media platform Discord has elicited concern over online spaces where users can post sensitive government material without notice of authorities.

Jack Teixeira, a 21-year-old airman in the Massachusetts Air National Guard, allegedly posted documents as early as December in a private Discord server, akin to a members-only chat room, according to charging documents.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin was first informed of the leak months later in early April, he said at a press conference last week.

Teixeira was charged on Friday with unauthorized retention and transmission of national defense information and willful retention of classified documents, which collectively carry a maximum of 15 years in prison.

The blockbuster leak underscores the challenge posed by social media platforms like Discord on which sensitive material can spread from private chat rooms into the public square, legal and national security experts said.

However, some experts and civil liberties advocates cautioned that expanded government surveillance of social media could violate privacy protections and limit free speech.

In an online statement on Friday, Discord Chief Legal Officer Clint Smith acknowledged the difficulty posed by the presence of sensitive government material but said the company had removed posts in connection with the Russia-Ukraine leak.

“Classified military intelligence documents pose a significant, complex challenge for Discord as they do for other online platforms – only authorized government personnel can determine whether a document is classified, unclassified, or even authentic,” Smith said.

“However, what is clear is that unauthorized disclosure of classified government documents violates Discord’s Terms of Service, which prohibit the posting of illegal content on our platform. Because of this, in connection with this incident, we have removed content, terminated user accounts, and are cooperating with the efforts of the United States Departments of Defense and Justice in their investigation of this incident,” he added.

The Biden administration, meanwhile, is considering an expansion of its surveillance of social media sites and chat rooms in the aftermath of the leak, NBC reported last week.

Discord, a platform with more than 150 million users worldwide, grew in popularity during the pandemic. Popular with young people and gamers, the site hosts different servers, or online communities, many of which are private.

In a 2021 cybersecurity report, the app drew scrutiny over its potential for enabling data theft.

“The Discord domain helps attackers disguise the exfiltration of data by making it look like any other traffic coming across the network,” a study from Cisco’s Talos cybersecurity team found.

The federal government faces robust legal limits in monitoring sites like Discord, however, since the U.S. cannot surveil private domestic communications without a warrant, James Lewis, a former senior intelligence official and a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told ABC News.

“Here’s an easy rule of thumb: Can you get it in a Google search?” Lewis said. “If the answer is ‘yes,’ it’s public; if you can’t, it’s private. Then you go down the route of a warrant.”

“If you had a private club and gathered around the table to talk, the government doesn’t have a right to break into that club,” he added.

In turn, social media platforms such as Discord face government pressure to monitor for illicit material but they encounter formidable challenges due in part to user preferences for data privacy, Eric Goldman, a Santa Clara University law professor who studies social media and content moderation, told ABC News.

“Social media providers are stuck in the middle. On the one hand, we want them to police against the dissemination of classified information,” Goldman said. “On the other hand, we don’t want them removing documents at the government’s request.”

While the images of the documents appeared to originate on a private Discord server, they later spread on publicly accessible social media platforms, such as 4chan and Twitter.

Enhanced government surveillance online could hinder free speech across social media, Patrick Toomey, deputy director of the National Security Project at the American Civil Liberties Union, told ABC News.

“The disclosure of classified documents on one gaming website doesn’t justify pervasive monitoring of our social media by intelligence agencies,” Toomey said.

“Suspicionless monitoring of social media chills speech and threatens Americans’ right to live without fear of constant government scrutiny,” he added.

Focus on social media in the aftermath of the leak overlooks the issue of how Texeira got a hold of the trove of documents in the first place, said Lewis, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“Why did a 21-year-old air national guardsmen have access to this material?” Lewis said. “That’s probably a better place to start because it doesn’t raise as many civil liberties concerns.”

While reexamining the pool of employees with access to highly classified information, the U.S. could also reconsider how it monitors such employees after granting them access, Lewis said.

“When you work for the government, particularly if you’re given security clearance, they usually make you sign a form giving them a right to access your bank account and other information,” he said.

“It seems like there’s a need for employees to expand that to include some monitoring of social media,” he added.

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