Not only is it ridiculous to permanently ban someone from the platform with 3 minutes notice for copyright violation, this ALSO isn't copyright violation! In the US (I don't know enough about other jurisdictions) this would almost certainly qualify as Fair Use and therefore NOT a copyright violation.
So Twitter is permanently banning people with 3 minutes notice for a first offense of OBEYING the laws (but apparently still pissing off the IOC).
Reversing the ban of this person once the story became widely discussed is NOT an excuse, unless Twitter is also reviewing all other bans.
Reversing the ban of this person once the story became widely discussed is NOT an excuse, unless Twitter is also reviewing all other bans.
It's exceedingly obvious, but worth mentioning anyway: They don't give half a fuck about anyone or anything that doesn't make them look bad in public (or if you have friends on the inside).
What happened to filing counter-claims? Someone can just file a DMCA against you and get you permabanned from twitter? I don't think the IOC would have any serious standing to claim copyright infringement.
Why don't we retweet that banned image and see how far Twitter is willing to take things?
Also, this just shows how Twitter's platform is unstable and can't be relied upon, if someone with money can just have accounts nuked from orbit. I know I would be better off self-hosting a blog, where I don't have to worry about fraudulent DMCA takedowns.
This seems to happen fairly regularly around Olympics time. One of the first big signs to me of Twitter being untrustworthy and not something to continue using was during the London (?) Olympics when a journalist was banned from Twitter at NBC's request for mocking NBC's coverage.
I've had an idea floating around in my head for a while of a distributed decentralized "Tweet" pub sub system. The actual implementation is above my personal ability though I believe.
So Twitter is permanently banning people with 3 minutes notice for a first offense of OBEYING the laws (but apparently still pissing off the IOC).
Reversing the ban of this person once the story became widely discussed is NOT an excuse, unless Twitter is also reviewing all other bans.