Twitter is expanding its ban on public private information users from posting videos and photos of others without their permission.
Matt Rourke / AP
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Matt Rourke / AP
Twitter is expanding its ban on public private information users from posting videos and photos of others without their permission.
Matt Rourke / AP
Twitter will no longer allow users to publish other people’s private videos or photos without their consent, in a new expanded policy aimed at preventing harassment and abuse on its platform. .
“Sharing private media, such as images or videos, can violate a person’s privacy and may result in mental or physical harm,” Twitter said. in a blog post on Tuesday, when the change goes into effect. “The abuse of private media can affect everyone, but can have a disproportionate impact on women, activists, dissidents and members. of minority communities.”
Twitter said that before considering removal of a video or image, it will only review such media after the person described in the content without their consent or on their behalf has notified the company.
This measure is partly aimed at combating doxxing, the publication of other people’s personal or identifying information on the internet – such as their address or phone number – is often done with malicious intent.
But critics fear the change will encourage widespread abuse of the reporting tool and say it leaves the power to decide what should or shouldn’t be released to the public in the hands of a media company. social media.
Emerson Brooking, senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Laboratory, tweeted that the rule was “written so widely that almost anyone can complain to anyone.”
Public figures are exempt from the policy, Twitter said. NS Social media company assures users that “context matters” and its privacy policy “includes many exceptions to enable robust coverage of trusted events and conversations of public interest.”
Brooking adds that a lot depends on those last two words.
Critics say the policy lets Twitter decide what’s trustworthy
Twitter said Under this policy, the media allows people to participate in public events, including large-scale rallies and sports games.
That clarification didn’t stop Ford Fischer, a documentarian who regularly shoots movies about political activism and protests across the country. He said the policy’s vague terms could allow law enforcement to shirk accountability.
“It puts it in the hands of Twitter to have the power to decide,” Fischer told NPR. “I don’t like the idea of journalism being some sort of exception that can be adjudicated on a case-by-case basis. I think there should be an assumption, you know, about filming things in public. “
He pointed to two cases where YouTube had sent him a privacy complaint against one of his YouTube videos. One is takedown request timestamp in which police are seen ordering the press to evacuate an area in time followed by the confirmation hearing of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh; other complaints called for the removal of a clip featuring bodycam footage, which Fischer said he secured through the Freedom of Information Act, of an Ohio police officer on assignment and arresting an agent from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
“I don’t want it to be based on a test of plausibility coming from a Twitter moderator,” Fischer said.
In theory, it’s a new safeguard for abuse victims
Sarah Roberts, co-founder of the Critical Internet Investigations Center at the University of California, Los Angeles, said the new policy gives abuse and harassment victims new access.
“It will certainly give moderators an extra set of options when it comes to dealing with cases where third parties use personal information (such as physical addresses, legal names, etc.) — a fact that’s not uncommon on Twitter,” Roberts told NPR. “People targeted in this fashion are often already vulnerable in other ways, and the real-world consequences can be deadly, such as in the case of SWATting.”
For now, she said, let’s wait and see how the new rules play out.
The announcement came a day after Jack Dorsey’s start as Twitter CEO, as Parag Agrawal step into the leadership of the company.
Editor’s Note: Google, which owns YouTube, is one of NPR’s financial sponsors.
