State Law

Why The Statewide Grievance Committee Doesn?t Need To Regulate Twitter

By Ryan

On word: unfollow.

Oliver Wendell Holmes would love twitter. It is perhaps the greatest marketplace of ideas in the history of human kind.

You’ve got 140 characters to say something or nothing.

To read what someone writes on twitter you have to choose to follow someone.

If you say a lot of relevant or interesting somethings people will choose to follow you. You’ll be retweeted and before you know it all sorts of people will start following you.

If you’re a spammer no one will follow you.  Nobody. Part of Twitter’s success is that unfollowing someone is quick and painless.

I could spend all day everyday tweeting things like “Need real estate lawyers? Put Leone, Throwe, Teller & Nagle to work for you” the same way a television station could choose to run nothing but commercials all day.

The only rule the Statewide Grievance Committee needs to adopt regarding attorneys Twitter pages is to exempt them from registration entirely. The beauty of it is the marketplace of Twitter is more efficient than any rule that attorney ethics committees could create to regulate it.

In Tweetspeak: No need 4 SGC to regulate Twitter b/c using it to solely to market is self defeating.

Full post as published by A Connecticut Law Blog on April 28, 2009 (boomark / email).