Twitterland: the radical terrain of social media, by Malcolm Harris (aside)

http://overland.org.au/previous-issues/issue-208/feature-malcolm-harris/

@destructuremal: https://twitter.com/destructuremal

Also, while I was on Twitter searching '@destructuremal', i ran into this: http://mashable.com/2012/10/28/hurricane-sandy-internet/

Question: do you think that re-tweeting may some day be acknowledged as an endorsement? This could cause a lot of legal issues. 

"Figuring out how to walk through a city made of words is about relearning how to talk" There is much truth to this, as I had to twist my information in new ways to adhere to Twitter's platform. 

"As long as people repeat it, the rumor becomes a self-fulfilling story" 



Punishing Twitter users is currently a very arbitrary way of using the legal system. Seen in this case, and cases where governments have used Twitter to trick people, Twitter can be used in tricky ways to skew the truth and change the outcomes of events. as stated in the article, "The law doesn't know how to treat Twitter, at least in part because we don't know all the ways to use it yet". We've only seen some of what people can use Twitter to do, and we will soon see more as people become more familiar with the platform and become more tricky. As seen with Malcom Harris, he used social media to get a large gathering for the Occupy event, which also got him a trial. He them proceeded to use social media to manipulate the situation, which goes to show that using Twitter to incriminate someone is hard to do. 
Another issue brought up by Harris is what will happen as social media becomes more predominant in our lives and the privacy that follows? Will our 'tweets' be used against us in the court of law or be used to incriminate us? The fact that Twitter can hand over your tweets with a subpoena can subject you to many things. However, one can also manipulate the situation as Harris did, which deems you safe. In order for tweets to be substancial use to law enforcement, Twitter would have to change their practices with registration on the platform. I do not see this happening anytime soon as this could anger some people and significantly reduce usage. Twitter can also take the route of a postal-style governance where everyones' tweets would be protected and only a warrant could be used to gain those tweets. However, like the subpoena, it could be very arbitrary means of incrimination if Twitter didn't change its registration.