On October 13th, there was an organized effort to boycott Twitter. I have previously written a blog post “Are You Prepared for a Boycott?” but I wanted to further explore the incident. The galvanizing issue was Twitter’s suspension of Rose McGowan’s account over “violations of policy” stemming from a phone number Ms. McGowan had tweeted. There is no published data on the number of Twitter users who boycotted (after all, Twitter would be the one to know, and they certainly don’t want to publish that statistic). Setting aside the important issue and relevant discussion of sexual harassment, I was struck by the public relations element of this boycott.
I was fascinated by how Twitter framed the issue as it related to their “terms of service.” An organization might be protected in terms of the law, but how your stakeholders see an issue and what the public optics are maybe be totally different. How does your enforcement of terms of service impact your reputation as an organization? Twitter is, if nothing else, a forum for the free speech of opinions. There will always be situations where free speech and the terms of service will clash. In this case, the Harvey Weinstein story and the resulting wave of public discourse created an environment where the blocking of a victim’s Twitter account was perfectly within the scope of the terms of service and totally inappropriate given the public “optics” of that account block.
As a consultant who works in financial services, I know financial institutions have to be vigilant to make sure their customers do not post private information on public social media channels. You might think this is common sense, and yet, everyday, there is someone complaining on Facebook about an issue with their bank. The bank reaches out to ameliorate the issue, and the customer promptly posts their account number. All FIs have systems in place to look for instances where private information is made public and sanitizes those posts, but they don’t subsequently block their customers from using their online banking credentials.
I’m guessing Twitter does not have an automated system in place to suspend accounts. Someone at Twitter made the decision to block McGowan’s. But there were other choices available to them: they could have obfuscated the offending phone number, or they could have taken down that specific tweet. However, in blocking the account, the (unintended?) consequence was that Twitter was held to account by its users for seemingly taking a stand against the victims of sexual harassment. Regardless of whether that was their intention, women got behind this and decided on Friday the 13th they would act, and the resulting action was a boycott on Twitter.
Twitter quickly reinstated Rose McGowan’s account, and they provided a statement that both reiterated it was solidly behind those, particularly women, who used Twitter to speak truth to power. What seemed to gall those commenting on Twitter’s response the most was the fact that Twitter is not consistent in how it applies its policies (for example, the @realDonaldTrump account was not suspended when he tweeted Lindsey Graham’s mobile number).
In the end, there is a big difference between what your services agreement legally allows you to do and what you should actually do in a given circumstance. This means you must think through likely scenarios in advance and brainstorm what your response might be. Even though your organization might not be in the business of airing the opinions of others, if you are online, you have created a public forum and must be ready to address a situation that, in hindsight, should have been handled differently. If this is an area you or your organization needs to address, contact me at david@i7strategies.com and let’s strategize together on mitigating this potential crisis.