'How Tweet it is!': Have Twitter Archives Been Left in the Dark?

Abstract

Social media is an increasingly prevalent method of communication. The information disseminated through these platforms is by nature ephemeral and at risk of loss. This has led institutions to build social media collections for posterity. The value of preserving social media for research purposes is increasingly important, yet significant legal issues must be addressed to make such collections viable.

While there is ample scholarly discourse on legal issues in web archiving, the same is not true for the newer sub-field of social media archiving. In this vein, this paper takes Twitter as a case study to analyse the potential legal issues that libraries and archives might enounter while developing a Twitter archive. Three issues were found to be most pertinent: (i) Copyright (ii) Privacy and (iii) Right of Publicity. While copyright is strictly a legal issue, privacy and right of publicity also have ethical paradigms to it calling for all stakeholders in the libraries and archives community to brainstorm.

Keywords: Copyright Law; Fair Use; Terms of Service; Privacy; Access

JEL Classification: K39