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 deciding whether to take an image down, it would take into account whether it and the accompanying tweet text were “being shared in public interest, or is relevant to the community.”
What you might call “the public-interest exception” to Twitter’s new policy at least makes it less self-evidently bizarre than a policy that required you to get a criminal’s permission before tweeting out his image. And the distinction the company is drawing here between private and public individuals is in line with the way defamation and slander are treated in the U.S. legal system. If a public figure (someone who’s become a household name, even if involuntarily) sues for defamation, she has to prove not only that the statement in question was defamatory (that is, it was false and that it harmed her reputation), but also that it was made with actual malice. If a private figure sues, they only have to prove that the statement was false and harmed their reputation, and that it was…
