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Twitter, Inc.

Twitter’s newfound universal acceptability

Sean Connley

Arizona State University

OGL 345: Organizational Ethics

April 2, 2023
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Twitter, Inc.
Twitter’s newfound universal acceptability

Twitter is a common household name for good reasons and bad. Lately, it have been

under scrutiny for its controversial actions towards censorship of user content relating to political

topics and user biases. As a platform that spreads information across the world in seconds, there

is a lot of responsibility required to handle that amount of power. The ethics of the social

platforms executive team is a key factor in the appropriate actions to maintain a healthy and safe

environment for all users. To understand Twitter’s stance on ethics and universal acceptability,

we need to analyze its mission statement, products/services, and business practices.

Twitter’s mission statement posted on its public-facing website is “give everyone the

power to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers” (Twitter, n.d.). If we

were to unpack this simple statement, there is a lot of power in this one sentence that the world

had never seen before the platform was introduced. Unverified information instantly spread

across the globe. This much freedom of course requires guidelines, so the company constructed a

set of principles that include promoting free expression, serving healthy conversation, and being

transparent.

The company has many sides to its business practices within the platform, but the key

topics are advertising, data licensing, and its strong stance on political speech. Their primary

source of revenue is B to C (Business to Customer) advertising that promotes services, products,

or key messaging on the platform. Another business practice that is very controversial as it

relates to user privacy, is data licensing. Twitter sells its user data to third-party companies for

lead targeting and undisclosed purposed. Lastly, Twitter has made big actions to promote its

stance on its user’s political speech on its platform. It has adjusted policies to fight hate speech

and the spread of misinformation but still faces backlash on its approach towards censorship.
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Twitter, Inc.
But we all know Twitter for its social media platform that was founded with the idea to

connect users through tweet posts and content interaction. But the company has expanded to

other products and services like ad sales and user analysis. All forms of revenue are around the

core factor of the user. WE are Twitter’s source of revenue.

This type of power of user information and interaction starts many conversations over

ethics. The company has made multiple public ethical stances, some of which include:

 Healthy Conversations

 Security and Privacy

 Civil Integrity

 Protecting the Open Internet

Overall, Twitter's ethical stance is to promote user expression through healthy conversation,

privacy and security of user information, elevate credible information, and enforce protection of

human rights on the open internet.

The contrast between Twitter’s revenue streams and its public position on ethics does

have an obvious contradiction. To sell user information to third parties makes room for the

misuse of information that can be considered unethical depending on the audience's views. That

along with censorship decided by internal staff can lead to bias, whether it is intentional or not.

These concerns require the conversation of universal acceptability. Defined in simple terms by

Immanuel Kant “the formula for universal acceptability…suggests that we should only do things

that we believe other people would find acceptable” (Fryer, 2015, p.109). Do you want your

private information and user data sold to third-party companies for undisclosed use or censored

based on an internal employee's personal perspective on company policy? These key factors are
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Twitter, Inc.
important for all social media users to understand as this control of content is not just found with

Twitter but with any internet platform.

Twitter has made important changes to its company policies to promote safety and care

for its users over the past few years due to controversies over censorship and the resale of user

data. This shift in company positioning with the public is founded on the mentality of

understanding universal accessibility and what its users find acceptable behavior. I do think these

changes are led by PR campaigns and I do expect to see more controversial information come to

the surface as this business type is funded by data, our data.

Fryer, M. (2015). Ethics Theory & Business Practice. (1st ed). London, England. Sage

Publishing.

Twitter, Inc. Our Priorities. (n.d.) Retrieved from https://about.twitter.com/en