Twitter Continues Legal Fight in Occupy Wall Street Protester Trial
Twitter announced on Thursday that it will appeal a recent ruling in an ongoing legal battle between the state of New York and a Twitter user, in which a judge ordered Twitter to hand over information on one of its users.
Context & Ripple Effects
Twitter's appeal is a reversal of its own recent behavior. In March 2012 it complied when Boston police and prosecutors sought subscriber data in a criminal inquiry (handing over one subscriber's records), but in April a New York criminal court ruled that an Occupy protester's tweets were fair game for prosecutors (the judge's ruling), and Twitter now says it will appeal rather than comply.
The story traveled unusually wide for a procedural filing — pickups at CNET, The Verge, Computerworld, VentureBeat, BGR, Betabeat, Bits and Pulse2 all on or about July 19 — reflecting how much rides on whether a platform can legally stand between prosecutors and its users' posts.
First-order effects
- Twitter must now litigate against the state of New York instead of producing the user information, putting its own resources behind a user's privacy claim in an ongoing criminal trial.
- The Occupy protester defendant's case proceeds while the ownership of his tweets is contested one level up, since the April ruling treated publicly posted tweets as prosecutable evidence.
Second-order effects
- Other social platforms facing law-enforcement subpoenas get a test case for whether they — or only their users — have standing to resist disclosure, which determines who pays for and controls these fights.
- Prosecutors' template from the Boston and New York requests is now under challenge, raising the cost of treating hosted public posts as freely obtainable evidence.
Third-order effects
- If Twitter's appeal establishes platform standing over user content, the industry moves toward a model where services, not individuals, are the legal gatekeepers of what police can pull from social media — a boundary question that recurs in every later government-access dispute.
The trend: Social platforms are shifting from routine compliance with law-enforcement data demands to asserting legal control over user content, with court rulings setting the permission boundary.