[Air-L] Library of Congress Acquires Entire (Public) Twitter Archive

Michael Zimmer zimmerm at uwm.edu
Thu Apr 15 05:52:43 PDT 2010


Thanks for the discussion, Liz.

This is the classic "but the information is already public" argument that, while technically true, presumes a false dichotomy that information is either strictly public or private, ignoring any contextual norms that might have guided the initial release of information or how a person expects that information to flow.

This is Nissenbaum's theory of contextual integrity, which Fred Stutzman has already invoked related to this case:
http://fstutzman.com/2010/04/14/twitter-and-the-library-of-congress/

Further, it is interesting that the LOC seems to acknowledge that there are non-public tweets within the archive: "...the vast majority...are publicly published on the Web"

-michael.

On Apr 15, 2010, at 5:47 AM, Liz wrote:

> Library of Congress to save Tweet
> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/15/technology/15twitter.html
> 
> Some online commentators raised the question of whether the library’s Twitter archive could threaten the privacy of users. Mr. Raymond said that the archive would be available only for scholarly and research purposes. Besides, he added, the vast majority of Twitter messages that would be archived are publicly published on the Web.
> 
> 




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