Twitter’s Going To Start Taking Down Videos. What Could Go Wrong?
Twitter’s new media policy will require it to decide when something is in ‘the public interest.’ Challenges abound.
Twitter is not so great at tweeting. That’s one obvious conclusion to draw from the hullabaloo that erupted today when the company tweeted a link to its new media policy, and described it in this way: “Beginning today, we will not allow the sharing of private media, such as images or videos of private individuals without their consent.”
Unsurprisingly, the tweet led to a lot of head-scratching responses from confused Twitter users, since that sentence seemed to suggest that the service would henceforth be removing any video of a private individual that was taken or posted without their consent, a policy that would mean that you couldn’t post a video of, say, the smash-and-grab raids that took place in San Francisco last week, or images of the Capitol riot. It was only if you followed the link to the actual document where the policy was laid out that you came across the caveat to the prohibition: “This policy is not applicable to media featuring public figures or individuals when media and accompanying Tweet text are shared in the public interest or add value to public discourse.” And the company added that, when…
