Twitter's dilemma

twitter's dilemma: we own our tweets but it still wants to control them

Twitter has argued that it doesn’t own a user’s tweets, but at the same time the company wants to control what users do with their content so that it can monetize the network. There’s an inherent conflict there that is becoming increasingly difficult for Twitter to avoid.

 Twitter was recently forced by a court decision to give up information about a user who was involved in the Occupy Wall Street protests in New York, including the user’s tweets. The company tried to argue that the protester in question owned the content he published through the network, and therefore he was the only one who could provide it — but the court disagreed. Twitter’s defence makes sense, but it also raises an interesting question: If users own their own tweets and should be allowed to control who sees them or has access to them, then how is Twitter justified in clamping down on or even cutting off various ways in which users can do that, which it continues to do? When it comes to ownership and control over content, Twitter seems to want to eat its cake and have it too. Federated Media founder John Battelle noted in a recent post that the company’s argument in the Occupy case raises a host of questions about what it means when a user owns their content, and what responsibilities that should impose on Twitter. For example, shouldn’t users be able to display their tweets wherever they wish, or connect with whatever external services they choose to connect to? And shouldn’t users be able to get access to all of their past tweets, something Twitter has so far only done in certain special cases with users like Andy Carvin of NPR? As Battelle puts it: 

 “[T]his builds a case for other ownership rights as well, such as the right to repurpose those words in other contexts. If that is indeed the case, I can imagine a time in the not too distant future when people may want to extract some or all their tweets, and perhaps license them to others as well. Or, they may want to use a meta-service… which allows them to mix and mash their tweets in various ways, and into any number of different containers.”

 Two conflicting visions of Twitter

 In a sense, there are two Twitters. They aren’t completely separate entities, but two different ways of looking at the company and its purpose — and the tension between the two seems to exist within the company itself, as well as externally. One version is the open network for real-time news and information, which acts as a kind of utility for anyone to distribute their thoughts and content, and it is this Twitter that people like general counsel Alex Macgillivray and CEO Dick Costolo are referring to when they say the service is the “free-speech wing of the free-speech party.” When looked at in this way, it seems obvious that Twitter would want to allow users like Occupy protester Malcolm Harris to control what happens to their content — after all, the network is simply the conduit for those comments, not the owner of them. In other words, it is more like a content-agnostic telecom carrier than it is a traditional publisher like a newspaper. As Twitter said during the Occupy case: “Twitter’s Terms of Service have long made it absolutely clear that its users *own* their content. We continue to have a steadfast commitment to our users and their rights.”