Twitter Now Shows You When It's Yanked a Tweet for DMCA

Twitter has just made a significant change in their privacy policy that they say will increase transparency across the site. Now, instead of removing tweets flagged with a DMCA copyright notice, they are simply “withholding” them.

Twitter will normally respond to DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) requests that involve the “use of a copyrighted image as an profile photo, header photo, or background, allegations concerning the unauthorized use of a copyrighted image uploaded through our photo hosting service, or Tweets containing links to allegedly infringing materials.”

Once a takedown request has been filed, Twitter notifies the user and gives them the ability to file a counter-notice to dispute the copyright claim. None of this has changed. What has changed is how the rest of Twitter will see these particular tweets:

“In an effort to be as transparent as possible regarding the removal or restriction of access to user-posted content, we clearly mark withheld Tweets and media to indicate to viewers when content has been withheld (examples below). We also send a copy of each DMCA notification and counter-notice that we process to Chilling Effects, where they are posted to a public-facing website (with your personal information removed),” says Twitter in its Help Center.

That is a pretty big shift from how Twitter used to handle removed tweets. In the past, these tweets would just vanish without a trace. Now, even though the content of the tweet will be removed, users will at least be able to see that there was in fact a tweet there at some point and it fell victim to a copyright claim.

Here’s how a tweet (with an infringing link) will look when withdrawn: