Twitter have adjusted their system and rather than simply removing tweets, they are ‘withdrawing' them instead. The reason is simple, users can see why they have been removed.

This change by Twitter is a direct move to support the community, highlighting when and why tweets get removed. Previously if a tweet was removed under a copyright breach it just vanished without notice. Now people will be able to see where the Tweet was placed and the subsequent reaction to the removal.

The new policy was explained in detail by a member of the Twitter legal team. You can read this over here.

There is a law that protects internet organisations such as Twitter and Google against copyrighted material that is posted by their users. To receive this immunity however the companies have to remove the offending material when they receive a notice from the copyright owner. The user can then form a counter-notice saying that the material should not be taken down.

A Twitter spokesman explained the change:

“[W]hen we get a valid DMCA request, we withhold the tweet until such time as we get (if we ever do) a valid counter-response from the user. In this case, if someone with the permalink tries to navigate to the tweet, they’ll see that it is being withheld for copyright reasons. We also send the requests to Chilling Effects for publication. Our prior policy was to delete the Tweet without any language explaining the takedown, then manually repost the Tweet if/when we got a valid counter response.”

Kitguru says: This is a serious issue for companies such as Google as they receive more than 1 million copyright notices every month.

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