Privacy and Injunctions - Evidence - Parliament

Facebook, Google, and Twitter—Oral evidence (QQ 1384–1455)
into a hotel nude; it is not acceptable, so we create a sense of good order and police that,
but we do not try to police the individual conversations that people have in restaurants and
bars within that public space. That is really where we feel comfortable as a platform that
supports user-generated content.
We are very transparent about where people cross the line. We have what we call
our community standards, which explain exactly what kind of content would cross that line.
Quite deliberately, we do not draw a distinction on things like political opinion and so on.
That is the way we have chosen to establish a user-generated content platform, and it is
very similar to most of them. I think that if anyone departed from that, they would not
become a universally popular service. If they started interfering with editorial judgment on
the kinds of platform we have, people would go elsewhere.
Colin Crowell: Essentially, the issue you raise is one about which people who
cherish freedom of expression would rightly be concerned. Twitter is a communications
network; it is a neutral platform. We do not mediate the content of our users. In the
policy we announced last Thursday, our ability to withhold a tweet pursuant to an
authorised entity requesting it comes with transparency built into the policy, in the sense we
will seek to notify the user promptly that an authorised entity has requested that the tweet
be withheld. We will also be transparent to other users in that jurisdiction, in the sense we
will not surreptitiously delete it; rather, we will put up a grey box that says “Content
withheld” so people can see that a tweet that had otherwise been served has been taken
down. Finally, it is our practice to lodge these requests with an organisation called Chilling
Effects, which will keep a log of the requests to which we respond in different jurisdictions
so everyone can see how we are comporting ourselves with this policy and what has been
withheld in different jurisdictions.
Q1448 Chairman: Will this help you to respond speedily to injunctions that are
issued in future?
Colin Crowell: It allows us to deal with things on an in-country basis. Prior to that
we had to deal with everything on a global basis. I do not pretend to know exactly how an
injunction process would work in that we have never been formally served with an
injunction, but the policy we announced was that, when we receive a request from an
authorised entity, we will deal with it on a case-by-case basis going forward.
Q1449 Lord Janvrin: Can you explain why there has been a major change of
policy, and whether any issues linked to privacy affected that judgment? It is a major step.
Colin Crowell: There is no magic to the timing of the announcement, and it was not
made with any particular issue or country in mind. Rather, it goes to the natural
evolutionary course of a company like ours, which started as a relatively small operation in
San Francisco and then the service and brand became global. We are now starting to
deploy people internationally. We have employees in London, Dublin and Tokyo, and as we
move into those different jurisdictions and start to do business in those countries, as with
the other companies that came before us in this space, we are trying to cater to the
contours of freedom of expression as they may differ in different countries, because trying
to deal with it by one ubiquitous policy from the United States is not going to work well in
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