Abstract
For free expression to thrive online, says Twitter’s
Twitter brings people closer to what’s most meaningful to them. We do that by allowing people to publish 140-character messages to the world – tweets – and by making it easy for others to subscribe to that flow of tweets. The ease with which people can publish and subscribe on Twitter has led more than 140 million people around the world to become Twitter users. Those users publish more than 400 million tweets a day.
There are an incredible variety of users and tweets. We’ve seen charitable campaigns, couples reunited, citizens communicating with elected officials, stars responding to fans, people empathising with one another even though their countries are enemies, blistering parody as social commentary, individuals demanding (and getting) redress from major corporations, and sometimes simply the witnessing of atrocity or revolution. Our role is to be a platform for what our users want to discuss. We focus on continually improving this platform.
To facilitate the range of topics and depth of connectedness, such a platform needs to have several features. It should be instantaneous and simple to use, so that ideas can be disseminated quickly and easily. It should be agnostic to the content that users wish to write or read so that everyone can find the things that are meaningful to them. It should let users speak in their own voice – including when users choose to be anonymous – so that they have confidence to speak freely.
The notion of letting the tweets flow, and only intervening in limited circumstances to address unlawful content, or when users violate our rules, has been an abiding ethos at Twitter since its inception. We have recently taken it one step further by publishing individual legal requests for the removal of content as well as statistics on the number of such requests we receive in a bi-annual transparency report.
To protect user privacy, foster the confidence to speak freely and respect our users’ view of their identity, we have always allowed our users to choose the name under which their tweets are published. We have never required users to register using a real name. We also notify users if legally permitted when we receive a request for their private information. And we have fought to preserve our customers’ ability to contest those requests.
Twitter is compelling because our users’ voices make it so. For that reason, defending and respecting the user’s voice is a core value of our company and gives substance to our commitment to freedom of expression. We also believe this work is an important part of what brings people to Twitter instead of other communications platforms. That makes it not only good ethical practice, but also good business.