Disclaimer: I'm going to assume this really happened, even though it's coming from a slightly suspicious looking Blogspot address, the description itself looks believable.
The surprising thing here is not the obvious injustice or the callousness of the Twitter team. Rather, it's that people think they somehow have a right to use Twitter's services and accounts like they were their property. The same goes for people who build businesses on Facebook and every other monolithic site. I think users need to understand that they are on someone else's turf, and they are subject to whatever the company decides to do. There is no reasonable expectation of fairness, or of free speech for that matter.
That's why building a business on Twitter is foolish. I hear it's done successfully all the time, yet people have to understand this is a very shaky foundation. We're not even Twitter's customers. Advertisers are Twitter's customers. Nobody should be surprised about this, in fact it's a miracle "outrageous" stories don't happen more often.
The issue isn't you or me calling him out, it's whether Twitter is acting as a platform or publisher by annotating the tweet. The document here alleges that they are like a publisher, and will lose vital protection. This has serious implications.
No, you're missing the fact that Twitter is a publicly traded company. If they knowingly provide false or misleading information in their filings, the SEC and likely the shareholders can go after them. It would be tricky to prove intent here, but there may be other risks. I'm not a lawyer.
> I don't understand this argument. Twitter hasn't tricked anyone. They have an enforceable terms of use agreement with their users. If you deliberately circumvent controls described by that agreement, they have civil recourse. It's their site and always has been.
That's actually not true, if it's public information, then you're free to grab it. See below:
I don't understand this argument. Twitter hasn't tricked anyone. They have an enforceable terms of use agreement with their users. If you deliberately circumvent controls described by that agreement, they have civil recourse. It's their site and always has been.
Depending on how one does it, that's true. But that's also not relevant here. Twitter as a private entity does not have to just say, "Welp, it's legal" to anything that happens on their site.
You have left out a very crucial fact which completely destroys your argument: Twitter has no verification process that the tweet was deleted because you're NOT ADVERTISING THE TWEETS. You're using them as source code. So the public is NOT privy to what you're doing with the tweets! So Twitter would have to get a search warrant to determine that you aren't deleting tweets! Of course they don't care; they care about what you're revealing to the public.
No, this is not Twitter’s problem, and if they fulfill this request it just goes down a rabbit hole that eventually creates more liability for the company than what they want to take on.
They had contracts that they took on when they acquired the company. Twitter are now legally liable for these contracts, I won't be at all surprised if someone sues them. And frankly, they would be in the right.
What an absolute debacle. This doesn't bode well for the entire Twitter platform.
Well, we're not trying to "solve" the problem. We're just trying to clarify that Twitter has no legal liability for the problem. If you delegate access to your account and someone proxies it; or there are all of a sudden all these GDPR violations flooding in because you gave away access to your contacts' private information when you delegated access to your account; etc etc; that liability should fall on either the user, or the entity to which the user delegated access. It shouldn't really fall on Twitter.
That's all we're talking about here, just making sure that legal and criminal liability is matched with delegated authorization. Because the legal ramifications are what tend to ensure security and privacy.
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