Twitter Yields to Pressure in Hate Case in France

The case shows how challenging it is for Silicon Valley companies to champion the free speech rights of users while complying with the laws of countries where they do business. It also highlights Silicon Valley’s Europe problem: the Continent represents a large and lucrative market, but its lawmakers, regulators and courts have hounded the industry in recent months on issues as varied as privacy and antitrust law.

For months, Twitter had fought a court order obtained by a private French citizens’ group demanding that the company turn over the user information. But on Friday, the company said it had handed over the information to a prosecutor in Paris, in response to a law enforcement request. By turning over the information, Twitter said, it had ended a lawsuit related to the court order brought by the private group.

In a statement Friday, the company said: “in response to a valid legal request, Twitter has provided the prosecutor of Paris, Presse et Libertés Publiques section of the Paris Tribunal de Grande Instance, with data that may enable the identification of certain users that the Vice-Prosecutor believes have violated French law.”

The statement took pains to note that Twitter was providing the information to law enforcement through a legal request, not to the private group.

The case has important implications for Twitter users worldwide, as governments increasingly try to extract user information from the service. Legal experts say Twitter could have insisted that the French authorities seek to extract the user data by filing a claim in the United States, where the company is based.

Eric Goldman, a law professor at Santa Clara University, said that while Twitter had demonstrated its commitment to protecting free speech on many occasions, it was under pressure to meet nations’ demands for information on their citizens, both in America and abroad. Many companies face this pressure, and Twitter is all the more vulnerable now that it has an office in Paris, making its employees and assets there subject to French law.

“Governments have an unquenchable thirst for more information about their citizens, and Internet companies, as repositories of data, are going to be on the list of targets,” Mr. Goldman said. He added: “We are in no position to criticize another government for demanding data on users. Our government is doing that about us every day.”

The French Union of Jewish Students and SOS Racisme had sought the identities of the users, who had used pseudonyms, and in January a French court ordered Twitter to hand over the data. Twitter appealed, and lost, in June. The French student union filed a $50 million civil suit against the company, saying that it had failed to comply with the court order. On Friday, Jonathan Hayoun, president of the group, said that “Twitter has finally accepted its responsibility for hate prevention as a prominent player on the Web.”

In the second half of 2012, Twitter received over 1,000 requests from government agencies in the United States and abroad, from Australia to Turkey. It complied to varying degrees: 69 percent of the time with respect to requests from American authorities, 33 percent from the Dutch, and never in the case of countries like India, Israel or Turkey. Twitter on Friday said it did not have a uniform policy on how it treated law enforcement requests. “Requests for Twitter user information, whether domestic or international, are evaluated on a case-by-case basis,” the company said in a statement.

“There was more fighting Twitter could have done and chose not to,” said Christopher Wolf, a partner at Hogan Lovells who represents American technology companies, including in Europe. He added: “It is an episode that gives me some pause over the potential breadth of jurisdiction by a European government over a U.S. Internet company.”

Twitter’s legal feuds with foreign governments could muddle its expansion overseas. Running afoul of the law in any country potentially makes it vulnerable to having its assets seized and its employees arrested.

Complicating matters, Twitter, like other similar companies, has a sort of jurisprudence of its own, laid out in its Terms of Service. It does not explicitly address hate speech, but stipulates that “users are allowed to post content, including potentially inflammatory content, provided they do not violate the Twitter Terms of Service and Rules.” Those include a prohibition against “direct, specific threats of violence against others.”

The French case was prompted by a spate of anti-Semitic posts late last year. There were also jokes about the Holocaust and comments denigrating Muslims. Holocaust denial is a crime in France, and the country has strict laws against hate speech. Twitter removed the posts in France after the complaints.

Seeking Out Peer Pressure

Now, if I had the same experience with a gastroenterologist I had chosen based on glowing Yelp evaluations as I did at Momofuku, I would be checking myself into the emergency room.

My monkfish — a special favorite of the Yelp hordes — tasted like a pencil eraser. It was also so cold that it could not be described as cooked. It was deceased.

As for the destination-place atmosphere, imagine the decibel level of a Justin Bieber concert as filmed by Leni Riefenstahl. The service was haute rude. Our waitress responded to my timid questions about the oysters with a pseudopopulist arrogance that implied I was both hopelessly out of touch with the everyday experience of fishermen and boat owners, and too much a rube to comprehend the subtle distinctions of taste and class that characterized the world of the fancy shellfish.

And those fake proletarian desserts! “Compost cookie.” “Cereal milk.” “Crack pie.” The idea, I suppose, is that if you eat such downwardly mobile treats, it is only because you are so confident of your upwardly mobile status.

Yet the fact is that the crowd of Yelp reviewers had decided that Momofuku was the place to eat. And so we found ourselves eating at Momofuku.

For the pop sociologists of the period after World War II, “crowd” was a scare word, an impersonal entity that would extinguish your personality, spew contempt at your uniqueness, disable the operation of your individual instincts and judgment.

Now the “wisdom of crowds” has become an accepted platitude. “Peer pressure,” far from being a pernicious influence, is something we seek out as we race from one review site to another.

You might call this the Yelpification of culture. The goal and appeal of Yelp, and of countless similar companies, is to make everyone, regardless of income or social status, feel like a teenager trying to get into an exclusive private school that evening.

Heaven forbid that you should meet one of your friends at your favorite Thai place. No, you have to meet at everyone’s favorite Thai place. Because if your friend is like some of my friends, he or she will be Yelping the place you suggest, and you’re in big trouble if your favorite Thai restaurant has — unbeknown to you, who have been going there for 27 years — the status of the Ebola virus among savvy restaurant-goers. (“This place should be BYOT — Bring your own turmeric! Stay away!! Yuck!!!”)

No, you have to go to a place that has received the best reviews from lots of people, even if you have no idea who they are or what their motives might be for spending their time rating restaurants. Gone are the days when “conformist” was a slur on someone’s character. Now the idea is that if you are not following the crowd of five-star dispensers, you are a tasteless, undiscriminating shlub.

Welcome to the lonely crowd of the 21st century, both a revival of and a variation on the original “lonely crowd,” a term famously coined by the sociologist David Riesman in his best-selling 1950 book of that name.

Riesman argued that as the economy turned producers who manufacture goods into consumers buying them, the nature of society changed. People went from being “inner-directed’ to being “outer-directed,” from heeding their own instincts and judgment to depending on the judgments and opinions of tastemakers and trendsetters. Having lost touch with themselves, outer-directed souls were all alone in the midst of other people.

Of course, in one important respect, Riesman’s thesis has been radically refuted. Whereas he and other postwar intellectuals feared the conformist power of the crowd, we now fear the aberrant individual or individuals lurking in the crowd. The tragedy in Boston makes the postwar worries about mass society, inflamed by the perceived Communist threat at the time, seem trivial.

But in other respects, Riesman’s insights seem like the seeds of our own time.

Success of Crowdfunding Puts Pressure on Entrepreneurs

But last week Apple announced a redesigned iPhone that is not compatible with the dock — and because of manufacturing delays, some of the project’s original backers were still waiting to receive theirs. The designers are now scrambling to make an adapter and update the product.

“I’m just hoping to get mine before the iPhone 6 ships at this point,” one backer wrote on Kickstarter.

Crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo are letting designers and other creative people connect with audiences who want to finance their dreams, and they are becoming increasingly popular. Nearly three million people have helped a total of 30,000 projects meet their fund-raising goals on Kickstarter, the largest such site, to the tune of $300 million in pledges.

But for the creators of these projects, getting the money is sometimes the easy part. They then have to turn their dreams into reality, with a crowd keeping an eye on their progress.

This new model comes with a host of potential pitfalls that are often difficult for project creators to anticipate, and hard for the armchair philanthropists who back them to grasp. Backers are essentially putting their trust in the project creators, giving them cash in return for the promise of a future reward.

Those who give a few dollars to a moviemaking project may get their names in the credits, while someone who puts up $100 to support development of a smart wristwatch might be promised one of the finished items.

Much of the time this works out. But some projects, including several prominent and in-demand ones, have run into missteps and lengthy delays. The permits for a new food truck might not come through. Or a gadget like the Elevation Dock might be harder than expected to manufacture and ship.

The rise of crowdfunding came up often over the weekend here at the debut of the XOXO Festival, a conference that focused on new models and outlets for creativity on the Internet. The conference was co-founded by an early Kickstarter employee, Andy Baio, who sold $400 tickets on Kickstarter itself to gauge interest in the event and raise money for it.

The relationship between creators and backers on crowdfunding sites is still being worked out. The backers play the role of philanthropists, investors, customers — or all of the above. And when promised rewards are slow to materialize, eager backers can get cranky.

“It’s definitely a lot of pressure,” said Eric Migicovsky, whose Kickstarter project to create a line of “Pebble” wristwatches with innovative displays raised more than $10 million — more than 10 times what he had hoped to get. “There are 65,000 people who have preordered a watch that doesn’t yet exist.”

Mr. Migicovsky hired someone to help manage his in-box — nearly 9,000 people have e-mailed him about the project — and to post updates. He originally hoped to start shipping the watches in September, a date that he has had to push back, although he declined to say by how much.

A study by Ethan Mollick, a professor of management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, found that 75 percent of design- and technology-related projects on Kickstarter, most of which involve physical products, failed to meet their promised deadlines. In general, project backers seem to be understanding of hiccups and willing to wait as long as they are kept informed.

“The honeymoon period that we are experiencing around crowdfunding is beginning to come to a close,” said Wil Schroter, co-founder and chief executive of Fundable, a company that is applying crowdfunding to the venture capital process. “People realize there is real risk involved in investing in anything early-stage, whether it’s an idea, a charity or a product, and they’re starting to understand they aren’t buying off of Amazon.”

Kickstarter says it is not responsible for making sure a project is completed on time, or at all. It says project creators are legally obligated to fulfill their promises, but if they do not, Kickstarter has no mechanism for refunding the money that was pledged. The project creators can refund the money if they choose.

Sometimes project creators can be overwhelmed by the success of a crowdfunding campaign.

The four college students behind Diaspora, a project that aimed to build an open alternative to Facebook, began with the modest goal of $10,000. They raised $200,000 from around 6,500 people. But after three years, they decided to start on another venture and turned the code over to anyone who might want to keep working on it. (One member of the team committed suicide last year.)

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: September 19, 2012

An article on Tuesday about the challenges of entrepreneurs who finance their enterprises through crowdfunding misspelled the surname of the co-founder and chief executive of Fundable, which is using crowdfunding for start-up companies. He is Wil Schroter, not Schroeter.

Success of Crowdfunding Puts Pressure on Entrepreneurs

But last week Apple announced a redesigned iPhone that is not compatible with the dock — and because of manufacturing delays, some of the project’s original backers were still waiting to receive theirs. The designers are now scrambling to make an adapter and update the product.

“I’m just hoping to get mine before the iPhone 6 ships at this point,” one backer wrote on Kickstarter.

Crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter and IndieGogo are letting designers and other creative people connect with audiences who want to finance their dreams, and they are becoming increasingly popular. Nearly three million people have helped a total of 30,000 projects meet their fund-raising goals on Kickstarter, the largest such site, to the tune of $300 million in pledges.

But for the creators of these projects, getting the money is sometimes the easy part. They then have to turn their dreams into reality, with a crowd keeping an eye on their progress.

This new model comes with a host of potential pitfalls that are often difficult for project creators to anticipate, and hard for the armchair philanthropists who back them to grasp. Backers are essentially putting their trust in the project creators, giving them cash in return for the promise of a future reward.

Those who give a few dollars to a moviemaking project may get their names in the credits, while someone who puts up $100 to support development of a smart wristwatch might be promised one of the finished items.

Much of the time this works out. But some projects, including several prominent and in-demand ones, have run into missteps and lengthy delays. The permits for a new food truck might not come through. Or a gadget like the Elevation Dock might be harder than expected to manufacture and ship.

The rise of crowdfunding came up often over the weekend here at the debut of the XOXO Festival, a conference that focused on new models and outlets for creativity on the Internet. The conference was co-founded by an early Kickstarter employee, Andy Baio, who sold $400 tickets on Kickstarter itself to gauge interest in the event and raise money for it.

The relationship between creators and backers on crowdfunding sites is still being worked out. The backers play the role of philanthropists, investors, customers — or all of the above. And when promised rewards are slow to materialize, eager backers can get cranky.

“It’s definitely a lot of pressure,” said Eric Migicovsky, whose Kickstarter project to create a line of “Pebble” wristwatches with innovative displays raised more than $10 million — more than 10 times what he had hoped to get. “There are 65,000 people who have preordered a watch that doesn’t yet exist.”

Mr. Migicovsky hired someone to help manage his in-box — nearly 9,000 people have e-mailed him about the project — and to post updates. He originally hoped to start shipping the watches in September, a date that he has had to push back, although he declined to say by how much.

A study by Ethan Mollick, a professor of management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, found that 75 percent of design- and technology-related projects on Kickstarter, most of which involve physical products, failed to meet their promised deadlines. In general, project backers seem to be understanding of hiccups and willing to wait as long as they are kept informed.

“The honeymoon period that we are experiencing around crowdfunding is beginning to come to a close,” said Wil Schroter, co-founder and chief executive of Fundable, a company that is applying crowdfunding to the venture capital process. “People realize there is real risk involved in investing in anything early-stage, whether it’s an idea, a charity or a product, and they’re starting to understand they aren’t buying off of Amazon.”

Kickstarter says it is not responsible for making sure a project is completed on time, or at all. It says project creators are legally obligated to fulfill their promises, but if they do not, Kickstarter has no mechanism for refunding the money that was pledged. The project creators can refund the money if they choose.

Sometimes project creators can be overwhelmed by the success of a crowdfunding campaign.

The four college students behind Diaspora, a project that aimed to build an open alternative to Facebook, began with the modest goal of $10,000. They raised $200,000 from around 6,500 people. But after three years, they decided to start on another venture and turned the code over to anyone who might want to keep working on it. (One member of the team committed suicide last year.)

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: September 18, 2012

An earlier version of this article misspelled the surname of the co-founder and chief executive of Fundable. He is Wil Schroter, not Schroeter.