Thanks for your thoughts @computa_mike. I definitely read that and saw it the same way that you did. When I read the line item from the Terms however (below), it seems to be more specific and would appear to allow companies to ensure that their employees business-use of Twitter is complied with.
Here’s the quote from Section VII.A(3) of the Twitter Developer Terms. It states that Twitter Content may not be used by:
any entity for the purposes of conducting or providing surveillance, analyses or research that isolates a group of individuals or any single individual for any unlawful or discriminatory purpose or in a manner that would be inconsistent with our users’ reasonable expectations of privacy;
My use-case is certainly lawful and definitely non-discriminatory. I’ll further describe my use-case with regards to a user’s reasonable expectation of privacy.
Use-case for monitoring employee Tweets
Our clients are banks and mortgage lenders and their advertisements must adhere to regulations created to protect consumers from predatory lending practices. Social media posts have been deemed by regulators to be a form of advertisement. As a result, if a loan officer wishes to use their social media following as a way to generate new leads (and therefore, new sales commissions) their posts must be monitored by the company to ensure compliance.
That last sentence is important with regards to a reasonable expectation of privacy. They are told by their employers that, if they wish to use Twitter (or FB, Instagram, etc) for business purposes, then their Tweets will be monitored for particular keyword triggers (e.g. APR, down payment, credit score, etc).
If this sort of thing is straight-up not allowed, then (in theory) thousands of financial institutions would have to stop their business-use of Twitter or else be at risk of regulatory penalties.
If permission is explicitly granted (through company policy and/or Oauth permissions) to access a user’s Tweets, then perhaps it would be an acceptable use-case?
