The Indian government may have forced Twitter to “put one of its agents on the payroll, with access to user data,” a former security chief of Twitter has alleged.

Peiter Zatko, a highly admired hacker who was recruited to be Twitter’s security chief, made the allegations about Twitter’s India operations, as part of a longer whistleblower complaint. The details of the complaint were published in the Washington Post on Tuesday.

Zatko said that the Indian government had insisted on getting an agent on the payroll “at a time of intense protests in the country”. It wasn’t specified to which protests Zatko was referring but the government is said to have told Twitter to withhold some 250 handles that were tweeting about the farmer protests in February 2021.

The Washington Post said that “supporting information” for Zatko’s allegations about India had been forwarded to the National Security Division of the Justice Department and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

The newspaper added that there were indications to show that Zatko’s claims about India were correct, saying: “Another person familiar with the matter agreed that the employee was probably an agent.”

Zatko has made stinging criticisms of the way Twitter was run, accusing it of deceiving federal regulators and its own directors and having what he called “extreme, egregious deficiencies” in its defences against hackers. He also said it made “meagre efforts” to fight spam.

Another Twitter employee, Ahmad Abouammo, has just been convicted of spying on Saudi dissidents and passing on information about them to a close aide of Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman “in exchange for cash and gifts”. Abouammo is alleged to have “collected personal information including birth dates, addresses and phone numbers of Saudi government critics”. Abouammo said he accessed the information as part of his regular work.

Crucially, the former security chief says Twitter violated the terms of a 11-year-old settlement with the Federal Trade Commission by claiming that it had a strong security plan. Zatko also said he warned colleagues that “half the company’s servers were running out-of-date and vulnerable software.” He added that executives, “withheld dire facts about the number of breaches and lack of protection for user data, instead presenting directors with rosy charts measuring unimportant changes.”

Twitter is currently in litigation with Tesla’s billionaire chief Elon Musk who withdrew his bid for the social media company. Musk insists that Twitter has understated the number of bots on its platform and that is a key reason why he should be allowed to withdraw his bid without penalty.

The former security chief also alleged that Twitter “prioritized growth over controlling spam” and that executives could get bonuses of up to $10 million for boosting user numbers.

Zatko had been hired by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey in 2020 after there had been a major hack of Twitter’s systems. Before that he had made his name as a hacker known as Mudge. However, it appears that Zatko and Dorsey were not able to establish a relationship and barely met or even spoke.

He was eventually fired in January by Parag Agarwal, who took over from Dorsey as the company’s chief executive. Zatko told the Washington Post that Twitter was “rudderless”. The Washington Post obtained a redacted 84-page version of Zatko’s complaint which had been distributed to members of congressional committees.

A Twitter spokesperson Rebecca Hahn flatly dismissed Zatko’s allegations saying they were “riddled with inaccuracies”. She also accused him of, “opportunistically seeking to inflict harm on Twitter, its customers and its shareholders”. She insisted that Twitter had strengthened its systems since 2020 and that it had clear rules about who could access company systems.

Hahn added that Twitter removes almost a million spam accounts daily and about 300 million annually.

The US Senate Intelligence Committee is looking to meet Zatko in the near future.

Twitter is in a legal battle currently with the Indian government involving a request by the company last month to overturn alleged government orders to remove content from the social media platform and purported abuse of power by officials.