Like Google and Facebook before it, Twitter is disrupting how we communicate and interact. The difference is that, unlike the other companies, Twitter’s identity and ambitions are hard to discern. Is it a passive platform for users? Or a full-blown media company?

A Freedom Fighter

To get a better idea of what makes Twitter tick, I sat down last month with its head lawyer, Alex Macgillivray, in the company’s newly-finished San Francisco office.

Twitter’s new digs are on a still-seedy stretch of Market street that carries an aura of the bad old days when tech money had yet to flood into the surrounding SoMa neighborhood. Inside Twitter, of course, the feeling is different. The office has lots of wood, posh fixtures and big windows that pour in lots of light.

Macgillivray, the former Googler who everyone calls Amac, has grey flecks in his hair but still looks like a preppy law student. Since he joined Twitter in 2009, the young company has clashed with the federal government over Wikileaks and with New York prosecutors over access to the account of an Occupy Wall Street protestor. On the day I met Macgillivray, Twitter was in the news again for pushing back against NYPD security demands.

One obvious question for Macgillivray is why does Twitter keep taking up legal fights that it could simply duck in the first place?  After all, its compatriots in the tech sector routinely shovel customer data to authorities at the drop of a hat.

“One of our core values is ‘defend and respect the users voice’ and we think about that in the context of our business and our product,” says Macgillivray. He explains that helping people express themselves is a central part of working at Twitter.

“No one wants a pen that has an opinion about what you write. Everyone wants a pen that will write what you tell it to write”

Just Another Technology Company?

Twitter’s advocacy for privacy and free speech makes it an outlier among technology companies. But its campaigns do have much in common with famous media brands — from the New York Times to Fox News — that regularly defend free expression.

My colleague Mathew Ingram has argued persuasively that Twitter is in fact a media company itself. To makes his case, Ingram points to Twitter’s introduction of content-rich “expanded tweets” and its partnerships with NASCAR and other corporate advertisers. Macgillivray, however, disagrees with the media thesis.

“I haven’t actually seen anything that would back up that stuff. I haven’t heard of anyone stopping delivery of the New York Times because they’re avid Twitter users.”

Macgillivray, who is married to a reporter, does acknowledge that journalism and Twitter share a similar goal of uniting users with the issues that are most meaningful to them. But he maintains that outsiders’ speculation about Twitter’s emergence as a media power doesn’t resonate within the company.

“It’s such a weird question. We don’t think about it all. I always think of us as a technology company because that’s what the vast majority of people here do.” Macgillivray added, though, that Twitter’s CEO might hold a broader view.

“Dick [Costolo] has a more nuanced and interesting way of thinking about it.”

Whatever the future might hold, Macgillivray says that for now Twitter has no plans to hire writers or to follow Google’s lead in acquiring content. He adds that, unlike potential competitors, Twitter is still plenty satisfied to explore all the possibilities of 140 characters (the maximum length of a tweet).

“It’s an interesting mistake a lot of copycats make when they copy Twitter. They’re like ‘right, we’re going to have something exactly like Twitter but the first thing we’ll do is get rid of that pesky 140 character limit’.”

Overall, Macgillivray portrays Twitter as a company that simply wants to tinker with tech while making a great user experience. That’s all very well. But Twitter, ready or not, is facing mounting scrutiny from outsiders who don’t buy the line that it’s just another tech company.

Defining the Soul of Twitter

There comes a time when internet companies outgrow their plucky start-up schtick: Google’s “Don’t Be Evil” sheen wore off years ago while The Social Network stripped whatever aura of innocence still floated about Facebook.

Twitter’s own baptism as a behemoth came this summer. In August, it announced that it would rip out the feeding tube of tweets it offers to other companies unless they abide by diktats that state how Twitter material can be displayed. This means that some websites who rely on Twitter’s raw material could be left high and dry.

Twitter’s behavior has rattled some in the tech community who have called it a bully and a traitor to the communal ethos of the internet. (A pragmatist might respond that Twitter has to tighten control of its product if it wants to woo major advertisers.)

Twitter’s policy changes have caused a flap. But that uproar pales in comparison to the end-of-innocence moment that Twitter experienced weeks earlier.

The moment occurred during the London Olympics when Twitter snuffed the account of a British journalist who had issued a series of tweets critical of its partner, NBC.

The optics were horrendous. The world’s media outlets blasted Twitter for appearing to have taken reprisal against a journalist on behalf of a powerful corporation. Twitter didn’t help its case by staying silent for nearly 24 hours.

When Twitter finally did respond to the PR crisis, it was through a blog post by Macgillivray. The post offered a frank apology and explained that someone within Twitter had alerted NBC that the journalist had published the email address of one of its executives — a violation of Twitter’s privacy policies. NBC, in turn, reported the alleged violation to Twitter’s Trust and Safety team.  The team — never aware that the complaint originated within Twitter — independently suspended the journalist’s account in accordance with internal protocol.

This explanation is logical and suggests that Twitter was not engaging in deliberate censorship — even if parts of the explanation are unsatisfying (why did Twitter not just suspend the offending tweet rather than the entire account? Why did it treat an obviously corporate email address as private?).

For Macgillivray, who chairs the Trust and Safety team, the episode is part of an ongoing learning curve.

“A lot has been made of that moment. We realized we made a mistake, we came clean about that mistake while fixing it and apologized to the person … I hope we’ll continue to behave that way — to realize our mistakes and to fix them.”

He added that the NBC incident was a mistake but that it also reflected the effectiveness of the church-state division between the trust and safety team and the rest of the company. Macgillivray remains proud of the team’s advocacy for users and says it’s an important reason that people come to work at Twitter.

The Ethics of Engineers

Twitter’s corporate ethics also serve as a strategic recruiting tool. While companies could once lure engineers with good pay and lavish cafeterias, Mcgillivray says, they must now offer something extra.

“We want to be the best place in world for engineers to work. What are things engineers want?” He points to two things Twitter can offer: power over patents and open source code.

In the case of patents, Twitter has crafted an “Innovators Agreement” that promises engineers that the company won’t use their work to spur the ruinous patent lawsuits that are engulfing the tech sector. Macgillivray explained the idea was a nod to the values of its engineers but also reflected Twitter’s own experience with patent trolls (shell companies that don’t make anything but use patents to squeeze companies that do.)

“We had seen some stuff as a company that we thought wasn’t great. You can look at the game theory about what to do when sued. We studied it with some pretty smart people and it seems the only thing you can do is defend it as vigorously as you can and beat the shit out of these players.”

As for open source code, Macgillivray says that it empowers engineers by letting them show off their work and to take it with them from company to company.

Amac’s Newsstand

Macgillivray is a lawyer by training but his reading list resembles that of a public intellectual. Right now, he’s immersed in a book by Daniel Kahneman, a behavioral psychologist whose work explores biases inherent to human decision making. Macgillivray’s also been revisiting ideas by essayist, investor and Y-Combinator founder Paul Graham.

Online, his reading tastes include the New York Times, Ars Technica and “a bunch of blogs.” And, of course, Twitter.

So who are some people worth following? Macgillivray proposes the academic and “Why Women Can’t Have It All” author, Anne-Marie Slaughter, and the writer and activist Jillian York.

His Twitter stream also includes news from his native Canada and from prominent American conservatives like John Boehner and Michelle Malkin.

Macgillivray thinks the froth of voices in his Twitter stream refutes popular hand-wringing about a “filter bubble” in which people seek out media that reinforces their existing opinion.

“That takes a dim view of humanity,” he says. “We’ve always wanted to hear opinions that are not our own and that’s why we talk to other people. Twitter is a wonderful way to get opinions from people you might not otherwise bump into at a cocktail party.”

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Updated: The benefits of being on Facebook are fairly obvious by now: you can connect to friends and family and share things with them no matter where they are — and it’s all free! This quasi-public space is also owned and controlled by a corporate entity, however, and it has its own views about what kinds of behavior should be allowed. That inevitably raises questions about whether the site is engaging in what amounts to censorship — questions that resurfaced this week after a page belonging to film critic Roger Ebert disappeared, and a group of protesters in Britain found their content blocked. Who is watching the watchmen?

Ebert triggered a storm of criticism on Monday with his response to the death of Jackass co-star Ryan Dunn, who was killed in a single-vehicle accident early Monday morning. Police said that speed was likely a factor in the crash, and there have also been suggestions that the TV actor may have been drinking before the incident. Ebert — who took to Twitter after a cancer operation led to the loss of his lower jaw, and now has 475,000 followers — posted that “friends don’t let jackasses drive drunk,” a comment that drew attacks from Dunn’s co-stars and from celebrity blogger Perez Hilton.

The film critic later tweeted that his page had been removed (even though his comments on Twitter about Dunn never actually appeared there), to be replaced by an error message stating that the page had been removed due to violations of Facebook’s terms of use, which ban any content that is hateful, threatening or obscene or that attacks an individual or group. In response, Ebert said his page was harmless and asked: “Why did you remove it in response to anonymous jerks? Makes you look bad.”

Facebook has removed my page in response, apparently, to malicious complaints from one or two jerks. http://t.co/RdzUxll—
Roger Ebert (@ebertchicago) June 21, 2011

Facebook later said that the page was taken down “in error” and it was reinstated. But as Jillian York of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Global Voices Online noted in a blog post, it’s not clear what kind of error led to the page being removed. Was it taken down automatically after being flagged as abusive? York — who has written in the past about Facebook removing pages set up by political dissidents in the Middle East and elsewhere — says the company has denied removing pages automatically. So was there human error involved? And if so, what steps is Facebook taking to prevent that in the future?

If critics of his Twitter comments attacked Ebert’s page by repeatedly flagging it, they effectively took the same approach some governments have taken in trying to shut down dissent: Foreign Policy magazine columnist Evgeny Morozov said recently that he knows of at least one government that flags dissident group pages as pornography in order to get them removed. Facebook has also removed pages in the past that were seen as anti-Islam or anti-Israel — in some cases reinstating them later — and has taken down more innocuous content as well, such as pages about the benefits of breastfeeding.

And it’s not just taking down pages that Facebook users are concerned about: According to a blog post from one of the organizers of a recent public anti-government protest in Britain, a number of users reported that Facebook not only blocked them from linking to a website set up by the group, but from linking to a blog post about it as well. A spokesman for the social network said this too was an error that was later corrected — but, again, what kind of error it was isn’t clear. Nor is it clear what criteria Facebook uses to make these decisions.

As the British blogger notes in his post on the incident, Facebook is “increasingly the space within which people receive their information, including civic information.” We are living more and more of our public lives and getting more of our information through networks such as Facebook, and while that can be a very powerful thing — as we’ve seen with events such as the Arab Spring uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt — it also means that more of our information is being filtered by a corporate entity, with its own desires and rules, not all of which are obvious. The implications of that are profound.

Update: Facebook spokesman Barry Schnitt responded to this post via email, and his comments about the specific incidents mentioned (both in the post and in the comments here) are below. They have been edited for length.

• Ebert — “Difficult to say. Perhaps the reviewer misinterpreted [the term] “jackass” or the other fan comments as a concerted personal attack on a private individual. Perhaps they just meant to push “ignore” and hit the wrong button. In the end, we responded to the mistake pretty quickly.”
• Britain/j30strike — “The domain jstrike30.com, when originally registered, redirected to an affiliate site that’s associated with spam and other malicious content. We block many of these sites to protect users. In this case, we blocked the affiliate site and, when we found that this domain redirected to it, we blocked it as well. Soon after being registered, however, the domain was changed to host the non-spammy content that’s there now. Our system didn’t pick up on this, and it remained blocked. As Dave explained, we’re already working on improvements to prevent this type of mistake in the future.”
• Third Intifada — “As we explained publicly around this controversy, the page was reported many many times but we kept it up because it was an explicitly peaceful protest, even though it used a word — “intifada” — associated with violence in the past. However, the page eventually became overrun with calls for violence and was removed.”
• Breastfeeding — “No policy against this at all. I’d encourage you to search the site. There are dozens of groups and thousands, if not millions, of breastfeeding photos to be found. We have removed some pictures of naked women who happen to be holding a baby. And, of course, I’m sure we’ve made some mistakes.”
• Trademark comment — “Abuse of DMCA and other intellectual property notice procedures is a challenge for every major Internet service and we take it seriously. We have invested significant resources into creating a dedicated team that uses specialized tools, systems and technology to review and properly handle intellectual property notices. This system evaluates a number of factors when deciding how to respond and, in many cases, we require the reporter to provide additional information before we take action. As a result of these efforts, the vast majority of intellectual property notices that we receive are handled without incident. However, we are always striving to improve our practices. If your reader sends his info, I’ll have someone look into it.”

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user David Reece

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