Twitter: The Good, The Bad, The Indispensible
I recently got an email on Twitter’s terms of service update.
We're updating our Terms of Service on 2 October 2017. With these changes users will be better able to understand when Twitter may remove content on Twitter. Additionally, we wanted to make our Limitations of Liability provision easier to understand. Please note, that if you do not agree with these changes, you should feel free to deactivate your account at any time. Information about how to deactivate your account can be found on our Help Center.
Thank you,
Email on terms of service update (Abu-Fadil)
I read all 31 terms pages. There’s a section on my rights. Here’s where it’s interesting.
You retain your rights to any Content you submit, post or display on or through the Services. What's yours is yours -- you own your Content (and your photos and videos are part of the Content). By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through the Services, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute such Content in any and all media or distribution methods (now known or later developed). This license authorizes us to make your Content available to the rest of the world and to let others do the same. You agree that this license includes the right for Twitter to provide, promote, and improve the Services and to make Content submitted to or through the Services available to other companies, organizations or individuals for the syndication, broadcast, distribution, promotion or publication of such Content on other media and services, subject to our terms and conditions for such Content use. Such additional uses by Twitter, or other companies, organizations or individuals, may be made with no compensation paid to you with respect to the Content that you submit, post, transmit or otherwise make available through the Services.
On Twitter’s privacy policy, it says:
What you share on Twitter may be viewed all around the world instantly. You are what you Tweet!
Fine. So my content will be sliced, diced, and who knows what else by who knows what intermediaries, but I retain my right to it.
Is that a turnoff?
Screen shot of "In Defense of Twitter" cartoon
Maybe to some folks, but this cartoon about withdrawal symptoms after disconnecting from Twitter is priceless. Scroll down to the end. It should be a short animated film.
It’s particularly relevant if we follow the growing trend of threads, political or otherwise, featured by Politico, in which tweets turn into nasty conversations, arguments, or worse.
Handy Twitter knick-knacks (Abu-Fadil)
On the flip side, threads can lead to useful discussions and calls for action.
But in the “Age of Trump,” with plentiful venom and incitement to violence, we’ve seen anger boil to a level leading a former CIA agent to crowdfund a project to buy Twitter, in a bid to boot the US president off this medium.
Ironically, Donald Trump said he doesn’t “do Twitter storms,” to which critics were quick to list his many online outbursts in gruesome detail.
Screen shot of Trump saying he doesn't 'do Twitter storms'
There’s another sinister side of Twitter: as a vehicle for terrorists.
While the firm is making a dent in preventing ISIS from using the platform for nefarious purposes, other groups have managed to slip through the cracks, Newsweek said, adding that Facebook and Google were using automated tools to remove extremist content.
Twitter is making inroads in the battle to prevent the Islamic State militant group and its supporters from using the platform as a mouthpiece, but its single-minded focus on the jihadi group is allowing competing radical Islamists to surpass ISIS and maintain a strong online presence, according to a new report.
Let’s not forget white supremacists, xenophobes and other fundamentalists.
George Salama, Twitter’s head of public policy and government relations for the Middle East and North Africa, told Arab News in April new safety measures were helping in the fight against abuse and terror content.
Not everybody is happy with the safeguards. Those who’ve been restricted or shut down accuse the platform of having gone from a free speech bastion to a global censor.
Twitter aficionada (Abu-Fadil)
Business Insider, citing an op-ed by former Catalan legislator Alfons López Tena, said:
Any organised group can now make Twitter work for them censoring the people they target, to make it label their tweets as “sensitive” or “potentially offensive”, to delete all of them, to hide, suspend, and close the accounts they may see fit. It’s enough to launch an organised attack to denounce the targeted accounts as “sensitive”, “offensive”, “harming”, “spam”, and Twitter will obligingly censor it.
Polly Mosendz suggested angry tweets may require libel insurance.
“Big insurance companies have offered libel protection for years, but the popularity of social media has lent more gravity to the coverage,” she wrote, noting that successful libel suits are still fairly rare because the burden of proof rests on the plaintiff.
An interesting approach is using #Twitter4News. I attended a Twitter workshop in Dubai at the tail end of the Arab Media Forum in May to learn how to capitalize on the social platform for news and how to monetize it.
#Twitter4News workshop in Dubai (Abu-Fadil)
As a former international news agency correspondent and editor, I find Twitter an invaluable source of (true and fake), news, views, entertainment and engagement.
It’s a conglomeration of news agencies, but, as with any source of information, the key is to exercise critical thinking, good judgment and ethics in using it.