Can Your Tweets Be Used Against You in Court?
Are your tweets your own? The court says that they belong to Twitter and can be used against you. That’s the case for Occupy protesters who were arrested during a march on the Brooklyn Bridge this past fall. The judge ruled that “If you post a tweet, just like if you scream it out the window, there is no reasonable expectation of privacy. There is no propriety interest in your tweets which you have now gifted to the world.”
Judge Andrew Napolitano weighed in on today’s Fox and Friends, saying, “It’s groundbreaking. It’s the first case in the United States of America in which a judge has said because I tweet to the three of you [Fox and Friends] as opposed to emailing just to Eric [Bolling] there’s no expectation of privacy in the tweet.”
“This is an Occupy Wall Street protester and the government wanted all of his tweets, no matter the subject matter and no matter to whom he tweeted, and the court said that once you hit that send button, it’s not yours anymore,” he said.
Napolitano pointed out that this ruling only applies to this case, saying that it has no effect anywhere else because of the level of the court and this judge. He added, “The Fourth Amendment requires that before the government can get the documents or the tweets, or the emails or the text messages, it has to have some evidence of crime.”
Tell us what you think by commenting below or by tweeting us @FoxNewsInsider! Is this infringing on our right to privacy or is what we post on the Internet fair game?
