Twitter's Meme War Isn't About Civility, It's About Money

March 20, 2019 | Story | No Comments

If you're a fan of online music journalism, Tuesday was not a great day. Twitter, never adept at evading controversy, went on a suspension spree, freezing the accounts of popular music outlets Fader and Pigeons & Planes, along with more than 20 other smaller accounts. The crime wasn't posting graphic content, or doxxing people, or the targeted abuse or harassment of others, or any of the truly toxic terms-of-service abuses Twitter lists. It was posting short clips of the BET Awards, a four-hour telecast that had happened two nights prior.

According to a DMCA takedown record first surfaced by Vice, BET parent company Viacom had requested that Twitter suspend the accounts in question—a request Twitter granted within 24 hours. If that seems extreme to you, you're not alone: The suspensions soon spawned an obligatory hashtag campaign, with people bemoaning the move. Yet defending Fader was only part of the sentiment; the more trenchant strain of indignation focused on the social media platform's seemingly selective approach to account suspension.

Despite the fact that trademark and copyright violations are at the literal top of Twitter's list of "The Rules," posting clips of award shows is standard social-media fare. In fact, according to Deadline, the BET Awards were the biggest TV show on social media for the week—and as with the Emmys, Oscars, Grammys, and so many others, those millions of interactions could never come from official accounts alone. It's the starkness of the reaction that appears so unbalanced, especially given Twitter's notorious permissiveness around sexual and racial harassment.

Pigeons & Planes and Fader weren't the only site accounts to be muzzled by Twitter, either. An editor for music site Hip Hop N More tweeted that Atlantic Records had filed a complaint against them recently for posting the tracklist for Yung Thug's then upcoming album Beautiful Thugger Girls. (Atlantic Records did not immediately respond to request for comment, and the DMCA takedown in question, which also includes 2DOPEBOYZ, came at the behest of an unidentified party.)

These kinds of suspensions have happened before. Twitter has taken down sports media accounts like Deadspin and SB Nation, as well as sports-GIF-laden accounts run by average citizens. Looking through the Lumen database of online material-removal requests, though, shows that external complaints tend to come from big businesses. If the suspended account belongs to someone making sports GIFs, chances are the FIFA or the NFL was behind it. (Not, notably, the NBA, which seems to grasp the power of online culture and #engagement better than any other sports league. In fact, the NBA Awards aired on Monday night, and despite clips swarming across Twitter like a trap defense, the league didn't issue a single takedown request.)

Meanwhile, civilians routinely tweet about the difficulty they have convincing Twitter to suspend bad actors—spammers, harassers, impersonators. It's difficult not to read this disparity as Twitter favoring wealthy businesses over smaller users. Some of that partiality is to be expected, considering the deep pockets of media corporations. "Viacom and some of these larger companies have a lot of bandwidth to sue, and have put a lot of energy into protecting their copyrights," says Kate Klonick, a lawyer at Yale who studies private platform content moderation. "Twitter, YouTube, and others are on the hook if they don't comply, so they perhaps over-remove possibly infringing posts at the expense of user speech."

But while it's easy to rant about the relative toxicity of alt-right figurehead Richard Spencer's account, it's important to not get falsely equivalent here. "Looking for copyrighted material is a lot easier than finding hate content," says Jen Golbeck, a computer scientist at the University of Maryland. While social media platforms like Twitter and Youtube have access to a vast database of copyrighted material they can easily crosscheck posts' images, video, and audio against, no such tool exists for hate. Yet, anyway: "Twitter has the world's best database of hate content in the form of tweets that have been reported and removed," Golbeck says. "They could easily use that to develop the world's best filters for hate content, but they don't seem to have put much money or effort into that." So to all the beleaguered music blogs and victims of harassment: If you want to get your needs to the top of Twitter's priority list, you'd better start making some serious money.