In and around the Watergate scandal, confidential information was leaked to the press. Ethics breach? In the eyes of the leakers governmental employers, definitely. Good journalism? Hell yes. So why should Tech Crunch behave differently with its Twitter information? It shouldn’t, and here’s why:
The company is also hard at work defining a new Terms of Service agreement which will launch in conjunction with new APIs. These will determine what kind of commercial messages Twitter will have rights to monetize via ads. Twitter wants to “take a far reaching license to the content, with two exceptions (endorsement, content profit), and no opt-out.” Twitter also talked about making its API license “more throttled than ToS.”
So yes, Tech Crunch is not experiencing a fail of ethics. In fact, they discussed what they wanted to talk about with Twitter, and while Twitter isn’t exactly happy about it, they’ve agreed to it.
Tags: ethics, tech crunch, twitter