Twitter Suspends Accounts

On Tuesday, August 19, when the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant’s (ISIS) video of the beheading of American journalist James Foley went “viral”, it raised many important questions. And it wasn’t about whether we should outrage more over the beheading or the dead children of Gaza, as a large portion of the discourse on the subject has been reduced to.

It was about social media itself. Is the social media style of dissemination of news – without slants and any editorialising – actually problematic at times? Would any editor – irrespective of political ideology and belief – have let the video run uncensored?

Within minutes of the video being uploaded on YouTube, it was all over social media, ably aided by the virality devices of shares and retweets. A day later though, Twitter’s Chief Executive Officer Dick Costolo announced that Twitter was in the process of suspending accounts which had posted graphic imagery details relating to the incident.

YouTube, too, had by then taken down the video citing violation of their violence policy.

However, was Twitter’s decision – essentially reactive in nature – enough? Or was it, as some have pointed out, even necessary? While many contend that publishing – and circulating the video – amounts to very little apart from giving legitimacy to ISIS’s propaganda, the other side has argued that it “should be seen as a brutal reminder of what has been going on in parts of the Middle East”.

Also, given the current polarised climate, there may be a genuine fear that the video may invoke hate-mongering towards minorities, given a Fox News host’s recent Islamophobic rant. Andrea Tantaros, while discussing the ISIS’s beheading, equated radical fringe elements like the ISIS to all of Islam. Tantaros quite simply said that you can solve the problem with a “bullet to the head” and that it’s the only thing “these people” would understand. An argument for pulling the video can then be to control passions.

When we asked Twitter India’s Raheel Khursheed what prompted Twitter to suspend accounts of people sharing the video and grabs of it, he directed us to Twitter support page. Ostensibly, it seems like a violation of “Violence and Threats” clause, which says: “You may not publish or post direct, specific threats of violence against others.” Khursheed, citing company policy, refused to answer any queries regarding suspension of any specific India-based handles.

It was reported that the journalist’s cousin, Kelly Foley, had earlier urged people on Twitter to not watch the video and respect the family’s privacy. According to Twitter policy, it can remove imagery of deceased individuals in certain cases in order to respect the wishes of loved ones. Though there’s no clarity on whether the journalist’s family did indeed ask Twitter to take down the video.

Back home, though, opinion was divided among journalists on whether the video should have been removed from Twitter.

To be sure, Twitter has its job cut out, for things proliferate extremely fast on it. While many people have deleted tweets with links to the video, it is extremely difficult to track modified retweets, and as they say, thing once up on the Internet stay there forever. In fact, at the time of writing this, many copies of the original video are available through a simple Google search.

Amid the din sparked by Twitter’s actions – and add to that the state of extreme polarisation the world is in now – the dynamics of news dissemination through social media will perhaps not see any meaningful scrutiny immediately. However, it remains a subject that needs to be visited in less volatile times.