Betrayal at Twitter

Twitter has released five names to French prosecutors after fighting for months against a court order. by a private French citizens’ group. The tweeters who were given up had posted anti-Semitic tweets that went against French anti-hate laws.

The site released a statement trying to rationalize the duplicity with stuff about a “valid legal request” and making sure it was clear that the information was passed on to law enforcement and not just the
FrenchUnion of Jewish Students and SOS Racisme (the organizations that sought the identities).

As an American, I feel it’s incredibly important to uphold free speech and protect it for everyone, no matter what incredibly wretched, hateful words the five individuals spewed on their pages. Unfortunately, conflicting values across countries make that very difficult to do.

Governments increasingly hound sites like Twitter for more and more information, and it’s cause for alarm for anyone who uses social media. In this instance, Twitter appealed the decision—to no avail—in June.

Despite being pretty well known for theoretically protecting its users’ free-speech rights, it is not the first time Twitter has caused a commotion for abusing its relationship with its tweeps. During the last Olympics, the company actually turned off an account belonging to British journalist Guy Adams when he continually criticized one of Twitter’s corporate partners in his tweets.

Twitter’s sketchy handling of its users is not insignificant for us here in the United States, because such privacy invasions are not unique. Other Internet giants have also faced pressure to meet the legal restraints of other countries, adhering to intense political pressure and making money all at the same time.

Google, for one famous example, went against its own mission statement when it finally caved in to China’s demands to censor its content.

More recently, Tumblr caused some uproar when it decided to change how not-safe-for-work and adult content is viewed. Yahoo purchased the company back in May for $1.1 billion and promised to “let Tumblr be Tumblr,” but evidently couldn’t even wait six months before changing it. Now indexing is disabled on anything tagged as “adult,” which makes it incredibly difficult to find all those nudie pictures without a direct link.

These kinds of shenanigans have implications that impact how the world finds porn—and, possibly more importantly, how it communicates. As other countries grow toward their own levels of free speech, minor injustices such as these only serve to slow progress.

Plus, Twitter giving out user account names always means they could (and probably will) do it again, and for who knows what reason. The Internet increasingly facilitates global communication and provides an outlet for what we all hope is anonymous discussion, but perhaps we shouldn’t be
so naive.

In just the second half of 2012, Twitter had 1,009 government requests for user information. Of those, a whopping 815 came from none other than Uncle Sam himself.

One of the problems with social media sites is how easy it is to pretend that our information is protected, anonymous and safe, or at least that we are uninteresting enough that our data will not be handed out. Unfortunately, that just does not seem to be reality these days.

Still, Twitter is perhaps one of the most honest examples of social media, with its transparency pages that are easily accessible on the Internet. At Transparency. Twitter.com, anyone can look up exactly which countries are requesting data and user accounts, usually in connection with criminal investigations.

Perhaps as we continue further into the age of tweets, posts and hashtags, we need to remain a bit more paranoid about protecting our information. We can’t always trust these sites to do it for us.