Twitter, and Their Take on Public Interest

TechInAfrica – Twitter has existed in the internet since its launch on 2006, but has only gained popularity around 2010 when it was renowned the biggest micro-blogging site. As its true purpose, personal users and verified accounts alike can tweet anything to their hearts’ content. Even the tweets that violated the platform’s rules weren’t taken down. Twitter mainly regarded those as parts of important conversations, thus potentially disturbing the interlocutors if the company were to make a one-sided decision and delete them. Yet on June 27^th, Twitter introduced a new notice on their Help page to clear up confusion for both its users and developers.

The notice emphasizes that certain accounts—namely government officials and other influential people in the field of politics—may express their concerns in tweets that violates Twitter’s term of use. Such controversial tweets could lead to public outrage and even invite debate and discussion. Addressing this problem, Twitter has added a new feature which allows users to choose whether to see the referred tweets by a notice on their screens—every time a public figure seems to violate Twitter’s guidelines of tweeting.

Because people’s opinions differ from each other—and because their developers can’t read your minds through your phone screen—this feature regards both sides of public perspective on such theoretically controversial tweets; interested or not interested. Additionally, this new policy only applies to government-related verified accounts with more than 100,000 followers. Representations of the government office, upcoming successors, and even those who’re running for legislative, judicative, and executive positions are also subject to this rule of conduct.

Tweets marked with this notice will appear less prominently on a number of features offered by Twitter—safe search, top tweets, explore, push notifications, as well as live events pages will not feature tweets that are of questionable nature.

Regarding this issue on a personal scale, I’d say that this protocol would serve as a better framework for both the audience and the account holder. Normal users would have a well-managed content on their timelines, and government officials will have to be more careful in expressing their perspectives on the micro-blogging site as they can be held accountable—if they were to act irresponsibly, that is.

What do you think about this new policy?

Source: blog.twitter.com