Sunday, February 10, 2013

I Miss the Twitter Updates.

There was a hue and cry about the poor privacy needs of students when Cal or someone copied a few tweets of students bragging about cheating, banging sorority candy, and praising proffies who played Eminem really loud instead of teaching.

So I posted an image here today of a number (there are hundreds every day) of students bragging about cheating on their tests. But I blurred the photos and names, as a nod to the earlier controversy.

I now learn that I've broken the sacrosanct terms of service of Twitter, however, so now I've taken that image down.

Here's a different one. If I've fucked up, I'd encourage you to let me know.


16 comments:

  1. Although it's become super-obvious lately that most of the folks on CM don't understand Twitter even a little bit, I wanted to communicate that it is explicitly against Twitter's terms of service to re-post tweets without attribution to the original author (this is why you're supposed to use "RT" within the service).

    If these are public tweets (and if you could find them, they definitely are), then they are in a sense published work and you are plagiarizing them when you post images like this. Seriously - just show their names/photos. And you might want to follow all of the other rules too: https://support.twitter.com/articles/114233-guidelines-for-use-of-tweets-in-broadcast

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    1. I am not a member of Twitter, and you don't have to be a member of Twitter to search Twitter and find tweets like the ones listed above. As someone who is not a member of Twitter, I have never even read their terms of service, let alone agreed to them, which means that I am under absolutely no obligation to abide by such terms.

      I don't know if Hiram is a member or not, but to be honest I don't care if he is. If he is a member, and has violated their terms of service, they can terminate his account. If he isn't, there's nothing they can do.

      You do understand, I assume, that violating a company's ToS is not the same thing as breaking the law?

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    2. And you, I assume, understand there's a difference between breaking the law and ethical behavior?

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    3. Corporations don't get to decide what is and is not ethical, and TOSs are not ethical codes. We are under absolutely no ethical obligation to obey their turns of service.

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    4. Despite what you may have heard, corporations are not people. And as not-people, corporations are not capable of making decisions. They are made up of boards and committees and all sorts of people who are the ones who actually make decisions. Those people create and release a product, which we have no obligation to use, and they require people who choose to use their product to follow certain guidelines. If you don't want to follow the guidelines, don't use the product. No one is forcing anyone to re-post tweets without the permission of the original author or the service on which they are hosted.

      The ethical obligation is to follow the terms of the service if you agree (of your own free will) to use that service, which includes posting screenshots of that service. If you don't agree with their terms, don't use their service.

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    5. You are confused. I have never signed any TOS for twitter. There has never been a contract between me and Twitter, and never will be. However, I can search twitter without having signed that contract. Doing that search does not in any way bind me to their TOS, and my ethical obligations as a scholar are quite satisfied by indicating that the information I found came from Twitter.

      If merely searching twitter did bind me to their terms of service, I could simply declare that one of the Terms of Service in reading my posts is that you must wash my car and give me a bottle of Tokaji. By reading my post you have agreed to those Terms of Service, and therefore I expect to see you soon with a loofa and delightful Hungarian wine.

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    6. You are confused. I am not talking about you as an individual consumer of Twitter posts or as a scholar reading Twitter. I am talking about CM, or you as an official voice of CM (when authoring posts), using a screengrab of Twitter as a means to increase this site's popularity/page views. Even if legal, it is not ethical to use another's writing to increase your own popularity without proper attribution.

      And let me also remind you that these posts were written by other users of the Twitter service, not by Twitter itself. If students want to post their stupid views on the Internet, they do so to be heard. It is not our right to deny them their authorship, even if we think they might regret it later.

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  2. Fine by me. If you're stupid enough to "Tweet" your cheating then you should expect your dumb-ass message to be broadcast. However, Twitter's own rules do say that names and images can be obscured in the interest of protecting privacy. (It sounds as though Twitter's main concern is making sure their bird-logo appears on everything).

    I don't think plagiarism is the right word-choice in this instance, anyway. Neither CM or Hiram are claiming or even insinuating that the "tweets" are their own.

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    1. That's an interesting point. So what would you call a student who quoted something in a paper with this citation: (some paper I read)

      Not plagiarism, just lazy?

      I think the privacy exception in their TOS is for when people protect their tweets, for example if you wanted to share a tweet from someone whose tweets are not public.

      Personally, the reaction from CM about Twitter in general has been (pardon) baffling to me. It's like someone shouting from the public square, and people on here want to repeat it within earshot of that square but don't want to say who said it. It's not like we're talking about student evals with identifying information here.

      In any case, the last thing CM needs is a lawyer reading it. I'm sure Twitter could claim a screenshot without appropriate attribution is part of their site design and therefore copyright infringement. Why poke the bear, especially when it is easily avoidable? Hell, they even have an online tool to make it easier to quote with attribution within their TOS - why not just use it?

      https://support.twitter.com/articles/20169559-how-to-embed-a-tweet-on-your-website-or-blog

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  3. Hi Hiram. We got four emails this morning complaining about the image. There's absolutely no winning with Twitter, I fear.

    The RGM

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  4. Right, Twitter really cares. Meanwhile I'm being followed by 400 Russian hookers. Not that I'm complaining or anything...just saying.

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  5. Wow. You really could not make this shit up. I never go on twitter or tweet, but please!!!!!!

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  6. I did my own search, Hiram. Thank you very much.

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  7. Copy paste the text instead of using screenshots and tell them to go fuck themselves because it's subject to fair use under the commentary/satire section of the act.

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  8. I think the problem here is that the twitter terms of service assume people will tweet ideas/statements they actually want to claim, now and in the future, while we're unearthing statements that the tweeters will, if they have the slightest shred of sense, wish at some point in their lives they had never posted.

    Also, of course, twitter, like every "free" web service, wants all internet roads to lead back to twitter.

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