Here I am, again, writing about issues that stemmed from the social media strategy of local startup MyFoodBag. I wasn’t going to write any more about it – I’ve written two posts here, traded more than 100 tweets about it and I even talked about it on Discourse for about 20 minutes (all without receiving any free food, I might add).
I wasn’t going to write any more about it, but then one of the people I was trading tweets with on Monday night decided to. And he wrote about it in the country’s most widely read newspaper and anonymously paraphrased (incorrectly) a tweet of mine as the main thrust of his three paragraphs on the issue.
I got caught up this week in a Twitter debate about the rights and wrongs of media tweeting plugs for free meals, and whether these plugs should attract the #ad hashtag which identifies them as advertising.
One tweeter believed legal obligations that affect publishers, such as the laws of libel, could not apply and that social media was akin to people having a chat over a beer at the pub. But given that that person had more than 3100 followers, you would have to say the pub conversation would have to be held at a big booze barn.
If tweeters are confident they are outside the law and have views about the ethics of wealthy businessmen they could test out the theory by letting rip online.
– John Drinnan, NZ Herald, 15 March 2013
I am one tweeter in the above. I say the paraphrasing was incorrect because I didn’t suggest anything of the sort about lack of legal liability. In fact I said precisely the opposite – it’s hard to follow given the back and forth of it, but this was my tweet in reply to Drinnan’s suggestion that a making a negative statement about someone would test whether Twitter was ‘publishing’…
https://twitter.com/DylanReeve/status/311056557930577920
My point there was that it clearly was actionable but that Damian Christie’s tweets were his responsibility not his employer’s. And while there are laws about libel that apply to Twitter, I’m not aware of any that would affect someone’s ability to speak about a product they are using (for free or otherwise).
Anyway, here is the pub comment in question – I was suggesting that statements on Twitter were more akin to talking to friends than they were to ‘publishing’ in the sense that we understand it. Even in the days before the internet if a journalist got a product or service to review he was likely to tell his mates in the pub about it.
https://twitter.com/DylanReeve/status/311053854550679552
In this respect I think Twitter is the Pub. The things we communicate on Twitter, even celebrities, are effectively things we’re saying to our friends. There are legitimate publications on Twitter that would possibly be held to a higher standard, but overall I think the important thing in making these judgements is the context of the person’s Twitter stream. All the people who tweeted about #MyFoodBag on Monday night are genuine people using Twitter in a personal way that includes frequently tweeting about things they are using/doing/seeing/eating/watching.
The number of people I’m addressing on Twitter does not change the way I use it. The things I say on Twitter are very similar in content and tone to the things I would say in person with a few friends in a bar. They are, however, public and archived so they do potentially make me more likely to face legal liability for my comments in certain cases – but tweeting about something someone gave me is not one of those cases as far as I am concerned. The same, I assume, is true of all the people who chose to tweet about the bag of free food they received this week.
Of course I much more clearly outlined by various thoughts about Twitter marketing and the My Food Bag tweets specifically in subsequent posts here which I believe John Drinnan saw, but he still chose to paraphrase my position very oddly, although it was anonymous so I guess he’s safe from the laws of libel 🙂
A clear lesson from all this is that Twitter is a crappy place to have a debate. It’s hard to clearly make points and it’s even harder to know if other people are interpreting them correctly. But of course we’ll keep doing it because, a lot like the pub, it’s a great place for sharing and challenging opinions and ideas.
