Twitter account suspension prompts user backlash | Hacker News Reader

Twitter account suspension prompts user backlash

bbc.com

100 pointsnsns56 comments

Spike Lee (Director) tweeted somebody's physical address.

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/cutline/spike-lee-apologizes-geo...

His account is still good though.

Things like these make the "private information" argument super fishy. Twitter has taken a very free speech oriented position in the past (just remember the not shutting down of lulzsec/anonymous accounts). The actions of Twitter in the NBC case and the close sponsorship alliance between both make Twitter appear as a very weak when it comes to standing up against corporate interests.

I fail to see how this is similar unless you have proof that someone filed a complaint and Twitter failed to act on it.

So are you saying that even if Twitter knows about Spike Lee's violation (which they likely do), Twitter does not have to act unless somebody files a complaint?

Don't worry everyone, I have just filed a complaint (above). I'm sure Twitter will suspend Spike Lee's account as soon as they receive it.

In all seriousness, you all might want to fill their inboxes with similar complaints.

Do you have a blog or something like that? Don't know if this gets enough momentum just from within the comment section. If you wrote a post on that I am quite certain it would go to the front page.

I don't have a blog. Thanks for the support though. Anyone and everyone who does have a blog is more than welcome to take my idea and run with it. The post in question (http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=4318034) is now licensed with the WTFPL (http://sam.zoy.org/wtfpl/).

Unless George Zimmerman files the complaint himself, I think you getting Spike Lee suspended isn't going to happen.

Maybe not me, but there is strength in numbers. I think the most important thing is making it, at the very least, an uncomfortable situation for Twitter. These 'untouchable' entities need to know they can't continue to get away with stuff without a fight.

It's more complicated than that. FTFA:

> He quoted an NBC spokesman as saying: "Our social media department was actually alerted to it by Twitter and then we filled out the form and submitted it."

So yeah, a complaint was filed, but the alleged violation was initially identified by Twitter.

I wonder if the NBC exec filed the complaint personally. After all, if it was his, 'private' information and email address, then what standing does the NBC intern have who filled the complaint have? Just a concerned citizen? Oh, but it wasn't a private email was it? I'm confused. A person tweets the corporate contact email of an executive and that's not ok? But Spike Lee tweets the personal address of someone he thought was Zimmerman's with the presumption that someone would act on that information and that's ok? Spike Lee potentially endangered a life (the people at address received death threats).. What's the worst that could have happened to an NBC exec-- he gets a strongly worded letter? Twitter should always come out in the side of presuming free speech unless that speech violates the law. Tweeting someone's email address does not meet that standard. And, the fun part is that NBC is a public company. Shareholders technically have a right to information regarding the executive team in the context of their role at the company.

C'mon Twitter, don't be evil.

I find it somewhat odd to claim a business email address as "personal" contact information. If he puts it out on business cards with company logo on it, or if it's anywhere on the web, it certainly isn't "personal" and it is obviously meant as a means for contacting him about business related things.

I just find this to be a cheap way of shifting the focus away from the public backlash about their crappy programming decisions.

And Twitter has gone along with it. Sigh.

Twitter didn't just go along with it - according to NBC, Twitter suggested it.

I've contacted Twitter via their "Suspended account" form: https://support.twitter.com/forms/general?subtopic=suspended

  Hi Twitter. I agree with you that tweeting another person's
  private, confidential > information warrants some sort of
  action on your part (not the least of which would be
  removing said tweet). You have chosen to suspend accounts
  for this. That's fine too.
  
  However, I believe your policy should apply to everyone
  equally. Most notably, Spike Lee's twitter account is still
  active. If you recall: he retweeted a tweet that he believed
  contained George Zimmerman's address: 
    http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/cutline/spike-lee-apologizes-george-zimmerman-address-tweet-015514123.html .
  Regardless of one's opinions on the Zimmerman/Martin case,
  this is in direct violation of Twitter's ToS and warrants
  immediate account suspension for the original tweeter and
  Spike Lee (and anyone else who touched that tweet).
  
  I know you will do the right thing.

EDIT: I received this automated message from Twitter:

  Hello, 

  If you're writing in about <me> being suspended, this
  account is not currently suspended; please review any
  previous communications from Twitter for clarification
  about what the reason for the suspension may have been.
  
  If you are writing in about an account other than <me>
  being suspended, please refile the ticket from the
  suspended account. 
  
  If you are writing in about an issue other than your
  account being suspended -- including if you believe your
  account to have been deactivated or compromised -- please
  refile a ticket via the appropriate form; you'll find the
  forms at https://support.twitter.com/forms. 
  
  Thanks, 
  Twitter Trust & Safety

I have refiled using the "Tweets/messages" form: https://support.twitter.com/forms/general?subtopic=web_tweet...

EDIT 2: I received another automated message, this time with a bunch of ideas on how I can troubleshoot my problem, heh. This message, however, included reference to a support ticket number and this:

  If the above links help resolve your issue, no need to
  reply. Otherwise, let us know where you are still stuck.

Well, it didn't resolve my issue. So I responded:

  Hi, I believe this automated response does not address my
  concern. My concern is about an inconsistent application
  of penalties for violating the Twitter ToS. It would be
  great if I could get a real person to look at this. My
  original message is as follows:

(With my original message included)

Inconsistent application is the entire point. Power is most fearsome when arbitrary.

I always find these sorts of situations to be kind of surreal.

Twitter has a wide number of policies that capture a large number of behaviors and they selectively enforce them when someone who has paid them a lot of money tells them to.

Twitter isn't a public company, they aren't even a 'news' service with any sort of reputation to uphold for impartiality. They have a bunch of servers which throw around the equivalent of SMS messages to a bunch of clients based on a self assembled directed graph by its users. Those servers cost money, the place that hosts them costs money, the people who run them cost money. 99% of the people who use twitter give them no money in exchange for that privilege. So the 1% that do give them money get to call the shots. Is this astonishing? Is this evil? Is this even surprising?

You want a service that is less beholding to the 1% use indenti.ca, you want to share what ever the hell you feel like with the folks who may (or may not) want to hear it, you can rent sn EC2 instance and blast it out.

I find the discussion about what Twitter should or should not do in this case surreal.

Corporations usually look out for each other.

Is a corporate email address really "personal information" ??

The email address is/was easily found by a google search. I don't think it was private information but I can see how it is 'personal'. It really depends on how Twitter defines "personal information".

> The email address is/was easily found by a google search.

It is now, it looks like it was not before: http://searchengineland.com/nbc-olympic-executives-email-was...

That article does a poor job proving that you could not find the name before with a simple google search and/or some basic deduction.

Yes - if it's not available publicly.

No, if you can guess it (e.g. name.surname@company.com).

It's still personal if you can guess it. For instance, you might be able to guess someone's GMail username by their Facebook vanity URL or their Hacker News username. That doesn't mean you can post their email all over the place.

If it's not posted publicly by the person, it's private.

Whether it's "personal" is not relevant -- Twitter's policy prohibits publishing information that is "private and confidential."

Since his corporate email address is neither, it would appear Twitter's grounds for suspension are quite weak.

Another theory is that his account was suspended for criticising a corporate partner, and the "personal details" is just an excuse.

Let's say someone "popular" posted a negative tweet about you, and included your contact information.

Would you want Twitter to notify you about it and see if you wanted to file a complaint, or would you rather just sit in a deluge of hatemail with no idea of where it's coming from?

I, for one, know that there is a thing called "Google" that I use for solving mysteries like these. Plus, applied in a general context, do you expect Twitter now to contact every email address posted on the platform to check back with the owner on the legality of disclosing the email address to the public?

Obviously you can't police the world, but if there is a system that prevents abuse that they have the ability to use, I see no reason not to use it.

Also, this has nothing to do with legality, only TOS/privacy policy violations that you agree to when you sign up.

The difference between me and the complainant:

I don't work for a massive news organization. NBCUniversal owns a broadcast network. Broadcast spectrum is held in public trust, with monopolies on access to that spectrum granted to a limited number of parties.

To my mind, this makes their executives publicly accountable. Y'want your fat media exec salary? This is a cost of doing business.

And let's be clear: this guy's work email was shared. Not his phone number, not his home address.

The Twitter Rules state "Privacy: You may not publish or post other people's private and confidential information, such as credit card numbers, street address or Social Security/National Identity numbers, without their express authorization and permission."

The lines are a little blurred when they consider an executive's email address which is already on a public website to be private or confidential contact information.

On the other hand, Twitter probably decided that suspending one user rather than upsetting NBC was an okay trade off. That appears to have been a miscalculation.

I doubt Twitter will suffer very long for it.

I wonder what would have twitter done if this happend in March 2011, and the e-mail address in question was that of a Libyan secret police "executive"?

Whether or not the e-mail address could be found out with "30 seconds of free time and access to Google" is irrelevant. Posting private information about someone violates twitter's TOS and therefore the account was banned.

The fact it's someone who criticized a sponsor of twitter is irrelevant because that account would not have been suspended if an e-mail address (personal information) had not been posted.

Common sense says that published corporate email addresses don't qualify as private.

I wonder if Twitter will ban me for posting your "private" Hacker News username?

Not to be flippant but where exactly is the e-mail publicly posted? I wasn't able to find it on NBC's site.

I also don't consider my HN username private because it is shown on a public forum (and I understand that it would have been).

It was on this page at least http://www.fidei.org/2011/06/boycott-nbc-removed-under-god-f...

Amusingly, Gary's email address is all over the Internet now. Couldn't twitter have just removed the offending message and saved themselves the negative publicity?

It's the fact that they don't enforce this policy that makes it controversial. How about to email Tim Cook about something? Plenty of tweets with tcook@apple.com in them.

His e-mail is public information - it's widely available on Google. Gary Zenkel's is not.

http://searchengineland.com/nbc-olympic-executives-email-was...

Beyond that, how would you like it if your e-mail, home address was tweet'ed out and you were heckled?

Tim Cook's email is widely available because of people other than Tim Cook posting it without asking permission, much like Mr Zenkel. I could guess all the other NBC executive emails too. Since emails usually bounce when incorrectly addressed it's very easy to get the format for any company. The more important information in the Tweet was that this was the specific executive to contact. I might have tried jeff.zucker@nbcuni.com because I didn't know any better.

If I was an executive and someone publicized my First.Last@company.com email address I would not be upset in the least. I'd be more worried about the reason I was getting heckled--my job performance.

You, and searchengineland, are fixating on the word "widely." At the last company I worked at, my work email was in a single place - on the site of my company, on the contact page. According to the searchengineland examination of the word "widely" (which I'm not disagreeing with, and I think is a poor choice of words), it was not widely available.

Maybe "clearly" available is a better word? But fixating on the word "widely" is clearly a red herring, and is clearly not something that searchengineland is advancing as a reasonable criterion for a TOS violation, and is clearly being intentionally obtuse.

The parent isn't fixated on the word "widely"— you are. Your entire comment talks about how "widely" is a poor word choice and, in doing so, misses the parent's point.

Swap out the word "widely" with the word "intentionally" if it makes you feel better, but don't claim red herring when the word was obviously used in an off-handed manner.

I was commenting on the link offered as evidence, which was fixated on the word widely. Any company that uses firstname.lastname@company.com is intentionally making emails available.

Tim Cook's email being posted around the 'net has nothing to do with this, and bringing it up only shows your lack of an argument.

Someone posted a private email address on Twitter. The owner of that email address filed a complaint, and the Twitter account was removed. Any other day, Twitter would be the Good Guy, but the Internet has a hard-on for hating NBC due to their Olympic coverage, so now all of the sudden it's cool?

bringing it up only shows your lack of an argument

Can you please elaborate on this? Both are high level executives, who's contact information has been available on the web.

Twitter proactively contacted NBC. I bet Cook would also like to get informed by Twitter each time his email turns up and asked to give his approval if the account of the user should get terminated.

> Both are high level executives, who's contact information has been available on the web.

Tim Cook has nothing to do with this instance, though. This executive didn't want his email address being passed around. Tim Cook might, he might not, who cares? Just because one person allows his info to be posted online doesn't mean everyone else has to deal with theirs getting out there.

Looks like his account has been restored: http://thenextweb.com/insider/2012/07/31/twitter-restores-th...

Wait.. Twitter notified NBC who then "filled out the forms" to have this guy suspended?

I thought Twitter didn't monitor users tweets?

The article says "He quoted an NBC spokesman as saying: "Our social media department was actually alerted to it by Twitter and then we filled out the form and submitted it."

I can read this in one of two ways: Twitter (the company) alerted NBC, or Twitter users on the social network Twitter alerted NBC. There's not much clarity there, but obviously the former is scary and confusing and the latter happens all the time.

the former is scary

Depends a lot on context. If Twitter had said "FYI, one of your e-mail addresses is currently publicly visible on our service, expect a deluge of e-mail", I don't see a huge problem. If they said "Hey, want us to ban this guy?" then that's something different.

From here[1]:

The team working closely with NBC around our Olympics partnership did proactively identify a Tweet that was in violation of the Twitter Rules and encouraged them to file a support ticket with our Trust and Safety team to report the violation, as has now been reported publicly.

Looks like your latter situation is exactly how it went down.

[1] http://blog.twitter.com/2012/07/our-approach-to-trust-safety...

OK then.. this is serious.

  "The team working closely with NBC around our Olympics partnership..."

I'm really worried about what Twitter is becoming.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com