Tweets Not Private Rules Press Watchdog

A picture taken on January 14, 2011 in Paris shows a computer screen showing tweets posted by people about the current situation in Tunisia. (Miguel Medina/AFP/Getty Images)

The press watchdog has ruled that Twitter messages are not private, and can be published by newspapers.
The decision follows a complaint by a civil servant who said that newspapers invaded her privacy by publishing her “tweets”.

The Department of Transport Official had published remarks about being hungover at work on her Twitter account, which had over 700 followers.

The Press Complaints Commission (PCC) said that it was quite clear that the potential audience was actually much larger than the 700 people who followed her directly, because any message could easily be retweeted to a wider audience. The posts could be read by anyone and not just those individuals who actively chose to follow her. The complainant had taken no steps to restrict access to her messages, although she did so following the publication of the articles in the Daily Mail and Independent on Sunday.

PCC Director Stephen Abell commented: “This is an important ruling by the Commission. As more and more people make use of such social media to publish material related to their lives, the Commission is increasingly being asked to make judgements about what can legitimately be described as private information. In this case, the Commission decided that republication of material by national newspapers, even though it was originally intended for a smaller audience, did not constitute a privacy intrusion.”

It is the first time the press watchdog has ruled on the privacy of “tweets”. Last month, a UK judge ruled that journalists in courts could use twitter to provide real-time updates on court hearings in certain circumstances.