NNSquad - Network Neutrality Squad
[ NNSquad ] Twitter, NBC, and the "Streisand Effect"
Twitter, NBC, and the "Streisand Effect"
http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/000974.html
By now you probably know at least the outlines of the recent
controversy surrounding Twitter, NBC, censorship, and the Olympics.
Let's very quickly review.
Unlike virtually every other broadcaster on the planet covering the
Olympics, NBC decides to delay and edit all non-Internet Olympic
programming for prime time, explicitly suggesting that American
audiences are "too stupid" to understand events such as the opening
ceremonies without NBC's "expert editing and commentary." NBC raises
ire in England when they cut a tribute to terrorism victims from the
delayed, edited, U.S. version.
NBC proclaims that their approach has been vindicated, since
viewership of their bastardized coverage is breaking records, and
since they're in business primarily to make money, not to serve
viewers in any case. Observers note that since most viewers didn't
know how to use the Internet to find "illicit" live feeds, they're
like any hungry person -- they'll eat what's put in front of them.
A journalist upset about NBC's handling of Olympic coverage sends out
a Twitter tweet with an NBC executive's corporate email address,
suggesting that viewers let him know how they feel about NBC's
coverage.
Twitter suspends the journalist's Twitter account, claiming he
violated Twitter terms of use related to "private information" and
"information not already published on the Internet publicly."
Mass interest in the story ensues, making the NBC executive's email
address one of the best known in the world.
NBC claims they only filed a complaint about the journalist's tweet
after Twitter itself suggested they do so, and NBC says they did not
realize this would result in the journalist's Twitter account being
suspended.
Twitter admits that their team partnering with NBC for the Olympics
did indeed notice the "offending" tweet and suggested to NBC that a
complaint be filed. Twitter stipulates that while it's possible to
argue about whether the specific email in question actually contained
private information, it was clearly wrong for the Twitter team to have
triggered this chain of events.
Journalist's Twitter account is restored (this might have happened
anyway after a warning, according to normal Twitter policy).
I'm very pleased to see that Twitter has clearly admitted that
proactive stream monitoring and dispute filing of this sort by Twitter
itself are inappropriate, and that they will take steps to avoid this
sort of confrontation in the future. The confidence of Twitter's user
community is perhaps its most crucial asset -- once really lost it may
be difficult or impossible to regain.
Of perhaps broader long-term interest is the whole question of public
information and censorship on the Internet.
We can make short order of the "was it public?" question in this
particular case.
The NBC exec's corporate email address was of the form
"firstname.lastname@nbcuni.com" -- a format that is not only highly
standardized for public email addresses, but explicitly exposed on NBC
Universal's own media contact Web page.
What's more, in this case the executive's address was already
specifically noted on various Web pages (including a page protesting
NBC from 2011), making his address public by an even more obvious
measure.
An argument has been made that his address didn't appear on many
pages, so it wasn't "widely" known.
I don't know what "widely" is supposed to actually mean in this
context, but the bottom line is that a simple search would find his
email address in seconds, so the absolute number of pages where the
address appeared is really utterly irrelevant. One is as good as a
thousand from the searcher's standpoint.
Clearly, this email address was public. Twitter could have quickly
made this determination to a reasonable level of confidence.
Which leads us to another question.
What if the journalist in this case hadn't tweeted the actual email
address, but rather tweeted the simple search terms required to find
the address? What would Twitter have done in that case?
I don't know the answer to this one, but the question itself points to
the fundamental issue.
Attempts to control the dissemination of information on the Internet
that has already been made public, are almost always doomed.
As regular readers probably know, I call this concept "public is
public."
We can be upset that certain information is out there, we can wish it
weren't, we can dream of turning back the clock and stuffing the genie
back into the bottle.
None of this will usually make any difference at all, except that
efforts to limit the spread of such information will often trigger the
notorious "Streisand Effect."
The Streisand Effect -- named for entertainer Barbra Streisand, whose
efforts to block the dissemination on the Net of information regarding
her Malibu home led to vastly more attention to that property than
would have been the case if she hadn't complained in the first place.
We see this sort of situation play out in various related forms again
and again.
Efforts to takedown already published data result in even more copies
appearing all over the Web, creating an impossible Whac-A-Mole
nightmare for anyone trying to remove the data, and sometimes media
attention that attracts orders of magnitude more people who then
access the data.
In the NBC/Twitter case, that tweeted phone number would have likely
had virtually no impact if Twitter hadn't suspended the account,
creating a cause celebre in the process.
That's not to say that Twitter -- like all Web services -- doesn't
have a legitimate responsibility to act in cases of actual, real
abuse.
But it's important for us all to suppress the urge to err on the side
of censorship, on the side of control. This is especially true
considering the reality -- like it or not -- that once information is
out there on the Net, it is in most cases effectively indelible, and
that efforts to retroactively delete such data will not only almost
always fail, but can easily do a great deal of collateral damage to
innocents in the process.
You need not necessarily revel in this state of affairs, but it is the
reality, and to fight against it is like trying to hold back the ocean
with a sandcastle.
As always, I appreciate your thoughts on this and other issues, at my
own email address of:
lauren@vortex.com
And that's one address you can share without fear of page takedowns,
account suspensions, or even guilty feelings in the dead of night.
Thanks.
--Lauren--
Lauren Weinstein (lauren@vortex.com): http://www.vortex.com/lauren
Co-Founder: People For Internet Responsibility: http://www.pfir.org/pfir-info
Founder:
- Network Neutrality Squad: http://www.nnsquad.org
- PRIVACY Forum: http://www.vortex.com/privacy-info
- Data Wisdom Explorers League: http://www.dwel.org
- Global Coalition for Transparent Internet Performance: http://www.gctip.org
Member: ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy
Lauren's Blog: http://lauren.vortex.com
Google+: http://vortex.com/g+lauren / Twitter: http://vortex.com/t-lauren
Tel: +1 (818) 225-2800 / Skype: vortex.com
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