PCC – Tweets Aren’t Private
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The British Press Complaints Commission (PCC) has ruled that journalists are within their rights to quote tweets from Twitter because they are not private.
The case centres around Department of Transport employee Sarah Bakersville’s tweets that were quoted in two national newspapers without her consent. Ms. Baskerville complained to the PCC that she had a “reasonable expectation” that the tweets would only be accessible to her followers.
But the PCC said her potential audience is much wider than that, “not least because any message could easily be retweeted to a wider audience,” the organization ruled. She’d also neglected to restrict public access to her tweets and apparently forgot that Tweets in feed that is not invitation-only show up in a public timeline anyone can browse or search.
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/02/uk-tweets-are-public-info/
And in other news, the PCC ruled that the Editor’s Code of Practice was not breached when one newspaper stated that the Pope is catholic and Bears do indeed shit in the woods.
