NY Times Asks Twitter To Shut Down Retweeting Feed

WesternActor writes "According to PCMag.com, the New York Times has asked Twitter to shut down the FreeNYT Twitter feed that basically retweets all of the Times' articles. Is this really possible? After all, the feed just points to a list of Times Twitter accounts, all of which can also be found on the Times' website. If the Times succeeds in shutting this down, it could have a chilling effect for Twitter and online free speech in general."

Comments

Um...

[Anonymous Coward]

Won't people just create replacements using lists?

If NYT doesn't want their material tweeted, then maybe they should stop tweeting them.

Re:Um...

[nstlgc]

Except for that it is.

shut out NYT

[fermion]

Just like the WSJ, and FT, this simply means that I won't be pointing any tweets to the NYT. No traffic driven to the site, no ad revenue. Maybe the $300 a year they want for an ipad subscription will generate sufficient revenue.

Re:shut out NYT

[couchslug]

No loss.

We can rely on Fox News instead. (runs)

erm

[cyberfin]

"it could have a chilling effect for Twitter and online free speech in general".

Eh, no. Just no. Stop it.

Re:erm

[kidcharles]

Who even mentioned the 1st Amendment? Free speech as a principle is bigger than just the 1st Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Just because something isn't technically in violation of that particular clause doesn't mean it isn't undermining the freedom of speech. As a hypothetical example, if Comcast decided not to allow any discussion of FCC regulatory policies to flow through their network infrastructure it wouldn't technically be a violation of the 1st Amendment, but it would quite clearly be a blow to free speech.

Re:erm

[Junior J. Junior III]

"Free Speech" only applies TO THE GOVERNMENT.

No, free speech is free speech. The constitutional protections of free speech are applicable to the government.

There is still plenty of sound argument and valid reasoning to want to have free speech that is protected from the actions of individuals and corporations.

In the real world, this becomes difficult or impossible to enforce. Hence the saying that free speech is not without consequences.

Nevertheless, it is in the interests of the people to advocate for a broad reaching, maximized freedom of speech, subject to practical limits of enforcement, and reason (let's avoid stupid logical paradoxes and fallacies in the pursuit of freest speech). There's some wiggle room for weasels in the concept of "practical limits" but clearly the guiding principle should be that the limits on speech should be kept as minimal as possible.

Corporate censorship may not be illegal, but it is still wrong and the good and righteous still ought to fight the good fight against it.

Re:erm

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Yeah, either they will take it down or NYT will stop letting twitter users around their pay wall. Its simple. Its not censorship of free speech, its "Hey, since we're doing this for your people, could you do this in good faith for us?" Free speech doesn't mean everybody has to give you a venue to say what you want.

The simpler version is that there is no court involvement right now. There is no 'free speech' issue or chilling effect or anything like that. Those terms were just used to grab eyeballs.

Re:erm

[Requiem18th]

No, but you have to understand that the problems extends beyond government policy and government-endorsed policy.

It is also effective in oligarchies, guilds or any environment of high level of cooperation and coordination among any industry leader considered to large to fail.

It is in fact not an on/off toggle, there is a progressive curve of ever increasing barriers of entry that start with commodities and end up in monopolies.

So very often it is wise to apply controls to corporations beyond simple market rules, or do you want me to post a list of catastrophes caused by lack of government regulation?

Of course the regulation process can get corrupted, in the end there are no silver bullets.

Re:They wont succeed.

[appleguru]

I should have looked it up before I rattled off a first post without being logged in, but it would indeed violate the standard TOS (unless NYT agreed to a custom version, which I doubt):

You retain your rights to any Content you submit, post or display on or through the Services. By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through the Services, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute such Content in any and all media or distribution methods (now known or later developed).

http://twitter.com/tos

Alternatives

[freakingme]

Luckily there are alternatives like http://identi.ca/ . Great joy for developers (lots of api access), and it's distributed, so they cant pull stunts like the ones twitter has been doing lately. Also, it can sync with twitter so you only have to type all your microblogs just once.

Please prevent news from happening

[ArhcAngel]

NYT: Please refrain from letting anything newsworthy happen until we have reported on it... Thank you.

And this is a bad thing - why?

[Third Position]

If the Times succeeds in shutting this down, it could have a chilling effect for Twitter and online free speech in general."

Anything that has a chilling effect on Twitter can't be all bad!

NYT's paywall is flawed, that's why.

[cultiv8]

The title for this post should be "New York Times Asks Twitter to Shut Down Paywall-Evading Account". The actual story here is how NYT's paywall is flawed

Re:Obvious

[earls]

Yes, please give him a cookie so we can track all of his predictions.

The irony...

[DrSpock11]

After their fervent Wikileaks support, and their history of publishing classified documents, now they're on the other side of the coin with people publishing information that they want to have control over.

Seems like poetic justice to me.

Re:They wont succeed.

[appleguru]

Did you even *read* TFS? That's the problem exactly. The NYT *is* the ones originally posting the content (yes, largely headlines), on Twitter. And now they are asking for the retweeting of their tweets to be blocked. Absurd.

A Bit Overdramatic Aren't We?

[mackai]

That a commercial entity requests that Twitter not automatically feed all of their news articles to the world hardly seems like an affront to free speech. You or I may not care for that policy but I must admit, the NYT isn't making much money off of me either way. The news reporting business in general is struggling to find a way to stay afloat and the cry that they owe it to us gratis doesn't help.

Re:Uhhhh...no.

[Mashiki]

That's okay, not like I use twitter. I stopped reading the NYT about 6 years ago when they went even more bat shit insane than usual. But if they want to put themselves in to a fine gated community and refuse to let anyone unless they pay. They can finish dying off in the era of new media.

NY Times Asks Twitter To Shut Down Retweeting Feed

[zill]

Zill writes

"According to PCMag.com, the New York Times has asked Twitter to shut down the FreeNYT Twitter feed that basically retweets all of the Times' articles. Is this really possible? After all, the feed just points to a list of Times Twitter accounts, all of which can also be found on the Times' website. If the Times succeeds in shutting this down, it could have a chilling effect for Twitter and online free speech in general."

Re:They wont succeed.

[Avalon73]

He's not even retweeting, though... that's the thing. All he did was mirror the list of Twitter feeds that the NYT has already published on the web as a Twitter list, so that you only have 1 thing to follow instead of 40. Nothing is being reproduced, or even forwarded.

Either the NYT lawyers don't have a clue how Twitter works, or they just don't like what the guy is saying about them. The latter is the free speech issue.

Factually Incorrect Title: There Is No Retweeting

[thehossman]

The twitter account in question isn't retweeting the URLs.

There is no automated bot in play here.

All this guy did was create a "Twitter List" of the ~40 official Twitter Accounts used by the NYTimes (they seem to have one per section of their site) ...

https://twitter.com/#!/FreeNYT/firehose/members

...if you follow that "list" you get access to all of those URLs.

You would get access to the same URLs if you followed each of those ~40 individual twitter accounts directly.

Essentially the NYT is complaining that someone is promoting the existence of their twitter accounts.

Re:Okay. I don't understand.

[larry bagina]

the NY Times tweets their headlines under 20 or so different accounts (nytimesarts, nytimesopinions, etc). freenyt has a list of all of them. You could do the same with any twitter client, too.

Re:They wont succeed.

[Kjella]

That said Twitter doesn't have to do anything just because it's legal. If NYT says "please stop doing X" then Twitter doesn't have to comply but they also don't have to refuse. They may find it's good business to make some kind of exemption for NYT - or not. After all nothing forces NYT to put their links on twitter either, if they don't like it they can take their ball and go play elsewhere. Personally I think Twitter should just tell NYT to shove it, but then I'm not always thinking with a sound business mind.

Twitter NEEDS to stop the re-tweet

[ChronoFish]

By stopping it at its source. So shutdown the NYTimes twitter account - that way there will be no way to re-tweet it.

-CF