'The Politics of Twitter Data' (Alexander von Humboldt Institut fur Internet & Gesellschaft Discussion Paper No. 2013-01) by Cornelius Puschmann and Jean Burgess [
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approaches Twitter through the lens of “platform politics” (Gillespie, 2010), focusing in particular on controversies around user data access, ownership, and control. We characterise different actors in the Twitter data ecosystem: private and institutional end users of Twitter, commercial data resellers such as Gnip and DataSift, data scientists, and finally Twitter, Inc. itself; and describe their conflicting interests. We furthermore study Twitter’s Terms of Service and application programming interface (API) as material instantiations of regulatory instruments used by the platform provider and argue for a more promotion of data rights and literacy to strengthen the position of end users.
In discussing 'Data Rights and Data Literacy' the authors comment that
Contemporary discussions of end user data rights have focused mainly on
technology’s disruptive influence on established copyright regimes, and
industry’s attempts to counter this disruption. Vocal participants in the digital
rights movement are primarily concerned with copyright enforcement and
Digital Rights Management (DRM), which, so the argument goes, hinder
democratic cultural participation by preventing the free use, embellishment,
and re-use of cultural resources (Postigo, 2012a, 2012b). The lack of control that
most users can exercise over data they have themselves created in platforms
such as Twitter seems a in some respects a much more pronounced issue.
Gnip’s CEO Jud Valeski frames the “owners” of social media data to be the
platform providers, rather than end users, a significant conceptual step forward
from Twitter’s own characterization, which endows the platform with the
licence to reuse information, but frames end users as its owners (in Steele,
2011). Valeski’s logic is based on the need to legitimise the data trade - only if
data is a commodity, and if it is owned by the platform provider rather than the
individual users producing the content, can it be traded. It furthermore
privileges the party controlling the platform technology as morally entitled to
ownership of the data flowing through it.
Driscoll (2012) notes the ethical uncertainties surrounding the issues of data
ownership, access, and control, and points to the promotion of literacy as the
only plausible solution:
Resolving the conflict between users and institutions like Twitter
is difficult because the ethical stakes remain unclear. Is Twitter ethically bound to explain its internal algorithms and data structures in a language that its users can understand? Conversely, are users ethically bound to learn to speak the language of algorithms and data structures already at work within Twitter? Although social network sites seem unlikely to reveal the details of their internal mechanics, recent ‘code literacy’ projects indicate that some otherwise non-technical users are pursuing the core competencies necessary to critically engage with systems like Twitter at the level of algorithm and database. (p. 4)
In the current state, the ability of individual users to effectively interact with
“their” Twitter data hinges on their ability to use the API, and on their
understanding of its technical constraints. Beyond the technical know-how that
is required to interact with the API, issues of scale arise: the Streaming API’s
approach to broadcasting data as it is posted to Twitter requires a very robust
infrastructure as an endpoint for capturing information (see Gaffney & Puschmann, to appear). It follows that only corporate actors and regulators -
who possess both the intellectual and financial resources to succeed in this
race - can afford to participate, and that the emerging data market will be
shaped according to their interests. End-users (both private individuals and
non-profit institutions) are without a place in it, except in the role of passive
producers of data. The situation is likely to stay in flux, as Twitter must at once
satisfy the interests of data traders and end-users, especially with regards to
privacy regulation. However, as neither the contractual nor the technical
regulatory instruments used by Twitter currently work in favour of end users, it
is likely that they will continue to be confined to a passive role.
