Twitter sends signal: Mind what you tweet, submits 3-mnth Tweets of protester to court

 Twitter may have sent out a signal that it’s in the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) space to play, make money and definitely not to engage in any sort of fight or be drawn into one by all means.

This follows the velocity of compliance by Twitter with a New York judge’s cut-off date last Friday to submit three months' of Tweets by an end-user who was arrested last year in an Occupy Wall Street protest, reports Associated Press (AP).

DigitalSENSENews recalls that last Tuesday, New York State Supreme Court Judge Matthew A. Sciarrino Jr. ordered Twitter to produce the information in three days or face a fine that he would calculate based on the company’s earnings statements from the past six months.

According to Twitter’s Transparency Report from July 2012, it is not uncommon for the entity to give up end-user data as part of legal challenges, especially on a global basis the company provides “some or all data” in requests for user information 63 per cent of the time.

The court had ordered for the data came as part of an appeal from the social networking giant that asked the court to reverse an earlier judgment. The case involves the private data of Twitter user Malcom Harris, who was arrested with 700 other protesters during an Occupy Wall Street (OWS) demonstration last October.

Also Bloomberg had quoted Sciarrino as saying “I can’t put Twitter or the little blue bird in jail, so the only way to punish [Twitter] is monetarily.”

The judge's order invited Twitter to supply information that might link Harris to the account responsible for the Tweets that were posted publicly.

Although it dragged foot initially, but in May, Twitter stepped in after Harris was reportedly trying to thwart the court’s attempt to obtain three-months of his Tweets. The court contended he did not own that data, which is stored on Twitter servers.

Harris Tweeted in May “ The secret is: there's nothing incriminating in the tweets.”

But the case is not so much about the content of the Tweets as the protection of data, private or otherwise, users put on the Internet.

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