53 Times Twitter Violated Free Speech, According to Tweeters

Daniel Bean
·Assistant Editor
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At Yahoo Tech, we make no claim to be constitutional scholars. But after just a few minutes of reading through the gobs of erroneous online rants lamenting that social media services are supressing “free speech,” we’re starting to fancy ourselves as bona fide Thomas Jeffersons.

First Amendment outrage buzzed across Twitter earlier this week when it was revealed that the microblogging platform would no longer support Politwoops, a global network of 30 websites that were collecting politicians’ deleted tweets. Twitter had already quit supplying information about deleted tweets to Politwoops’s U.S. site in June.

Politwoops’s argument was that the public has a right to know when elected officials erase their public statements; Twitter’s counter- argument was that politicians should have as much right to privacy — including the ability to delete tweets made in haste — as normal humans do. (Twitter won that fight.)

Some tweeters saw these as “repressive” moves by Twitter, similar to its attempts to ban hate speech and bullying, allow users to mute or block others, and deactivate accounts at the requests of government bodies. And, naturally, they took to Twitter to complain about it.

We won’t go into great detail about how wrong that line of thinking is (you can read about that here and here). The tl;dr version is the First Amendment applies to supression of speech by government entities, not corporations. But we are more than happy to supply you with a slew of rant-tweets covering the topic, solely for your amusement.

Consider it our way of celebrating freedom of speech.

Email me at danbean@yahoo-inc.com. Follow me on Twitter at danielwbean.

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