Twitter, Occupy, and the Rule of Law ? The Business Ethics Blog

As the 1-year anniversary of Occupy Wall Street approaches, it looks as if Twitter is finally on the verge of handing some key protestor tweets over to a New York judge. The tweets have to do with the timing and planning of a march across a New York bridge, a march that ended in mass arrests.

And, even setting aside the legal consequences of failing to do so, it?s the right thing to do. Companies have a general obligation ? a part of good corporate citizenship in the most literal sense ? to obey the law. There are of course exceptions, for instance in situations approximating some form of civil disobedience. Civil disobedience is best thought of as a situation in which an individual, or perhaps a company, openly defies what it takes to be a bad law or an unjust legal ruling. In classic cases, the party engaging in the disobedience does so in an attempt to effect legal change, and shows its commitment by being willing to suffer the consequences of standing on principle.

Now, tech companies like Twitter do have a principled stance to take, here. They are rightly concerned about protecting users? data. But tweets are decidedly and emphatically public, so the present case is quite unlike the case of a company being asked to turn over customers? emails or other private communications.

Twitter is in a sense duty-bound, of course, to put up some resistance. Being overly cooperative with law enforcement tends to look bad on a tech company, even if it?s only because people fail to distinguish between private and non-private information, or fail to distinguish between New York and Beijing. But a year?s worth of resisting is likely sufficient for Twitter to show that it takes privacy seriously. It?s time for Twitter to do its duty as a good corporate citizen in a society governed by the rule of law.

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Source: http://businessethicsblog.com/2012/09/16/twitter-occupy-and-the-rule-of-law/

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