#1

After reading Twitter’s developer terms, policies, and official Twitter blog posts, it is unclear whether it is allowable to create a service that allows a company to monitor the Tweets of their own employees in order to ensure compliance with their social media policies.

Can anyone offer any clarity on this?

#2

I read this article here : https://developer.twitter.com/en/developer-terms/more-on-restricted-use-cases
in particular this sentence

At Twitter, protecting and defending the privacy of our users is built into the core DNA of our company — and our developer and data products reflect that commitment. We believe that Twitter data can be a powerful force for good in the world — from saving lives during flooding in Jakarta to helping the USGS track earthquakes to working with the UN to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. However, we prohibit the use of Twitter data and the Twitter APIs by any entity for surveillance purposes, or in any other way that would be inconsistent with our users’ reasonable expectations of privacy. Period.

So I would say - as you currently frame the requirement (ensuring that staff comply with social media policies) would be rejected by the staff because it seems to have the hallmarks of surveillance.

However I think you can solve this problem in an alternate way - perhaps looking for all tweets referencing your company. You can then respond to these tweets appropriately. This way you aren’t snooping on your employees - you are responding to public mentions of your company name. Of course you could use other search terms (organization name, product name etc).

You might even potentially get away without needing an api request to do this because twitter provide a search tool on the web version.

#3

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?

#5

I’m no expert here, but would your employees be using their own twitter accounts, or an account provided by the company? Because I would suggest that if the account was the property of the company, and not identifiable to an individual then that might solve the problem.

I’m no expert here though - and this might be something that needs more investigation - but if someone tweets then those tweets are public, and searchable through the twitter search - potentially through the advances search on the web site : https://twitter.com/search-advanced?lang=en-gb

#8

Any chance that someone from Twitter could comment on this post?

#10

Surveillance such as this is against our policy. If we do notice that you are using our products for surveillance such as this, we will suspend your app immediately.

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#11

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