Social media companies are not only censoring, but they are also adding a new item to the agenda: make sure no one mentions that it’s happening.
The TV company Starz asked Twitter to take down users’ tweets on a story that explained how Starz shows were being pirated. Twitter promptly took down tweets linking to the story, but also took down references to the story and proceeded to clean the slate completely.
The original story, written by TorrentFreak, reported that several Starz television shows, including American Gods, had been leaked by online pirates. Starz reported that this story violated copyright policies to Twitter. However, the story itself had not violated any copyright policies.
Starz stated that the article had a link that led to piracy sites, but the article in question only had a screenshot of the pirated television shows.
Tweets linking to the article by Columbia Journalism Review’s Matthew Ingram and the Electronic Frontier Foundation were then taken down.
The article written by TorrentFreak about the takedown stated that “news coverage about piracy is not illegal.” Ironically, the article was deleted by Twitter from the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s account. Not only was the article taken down, but the tweet around the article was also taken down for “copyright infringement.”
The tweets were restored a day later. Twitter told Ars Technica that the tweets were removed “by mistake.” Starz also issued an apology for the incorrect takedown notice.
Ars Technica argued that this could have been avoided had “Twitter performed even a cursory review of Starz’s requests, which offered no evidence of copyright infringement.”
