Meet Twitter's free speech defender

That conviction explains why he spends so much of Twitter's time and money going toe to toe with officers and apparatchiks both here and abroad. Last week, his legal team was fighting a court order to extract an Occupy Wall Street protester's Twitter posts. The week before, the team wrestled with Indian government officials seeking to take down missives they considered inflammatory. Last year, Mr. Macgillivray challenged the Justice Department in its hunt for WikiLeaks supporters who used Twitter to communicate.

"We value the reputation we have for defending and respecting the user's voice," Mr. Macgillivray said in an interview here at Twitter headquarters. "We think it's important to our company and the way users think about whether to use Twitter, as compared to other services."

It doesn't always work. And it sometimes collides awkwardly with another imperative Twitter faces: to turn its fire hose of public opinion into a profitable business. That imperative will become far more acute if the company goes public, and Twitter confronts pressures to make money fast and play nice with the governments of countries in which it operates; most Twitter users live outside the United States and the company is already opening offices overseas.

That transformation makes his job all the more delicate. At a time when Internet companies control so much of what we can say and do online, can Twitter stand up for privacy, free expression and profitability all at the same time?

"They are going to have to monetize the data that they have and they can't rock the boat maybe," said Ryan Calo, a law professor at the University of Washington. "I don't predict Twitter is going to lose its way, but it's a moment to watch."

Jonathan Zittrain, one of his former professors at Harvard Law School, called it both a challenge and opportunity for Mr. Macgillivray, widely known as @amac, his handle on Twitter, and one that could influence the Internet industry at large.

"If @amac can help find a path through it, it may serve as a model for corporate responsibility for an Internet where more and more code and content is governed by corporate gatekeepers," Mr. Zittrain said via e-mail.

He added that the challenge for Mr. Macgillivray "is not only to pioneer a wise way through this thicket, but to implement it as Twitter's use continues to explode: it's complex maintenance on a jet engine while the plane is in flight."

Twitter hit some turbulence this summer, when it seemed to forget its principles.

The company briefly suspended a British journalist, Guy Adams, who had used his Twitter feed to repeatedly criticize the handling of Olympics coverage by NBC, a corporate partner of Twitter.

Silencing Mr. Adams led to public outrage (on Twitter, naturally). It fell on Mr. Macgillivray to explain, apologize and assuage. On the company blog, he confessed that a Twitter employee responsible for promoting corporate partnerships had been monitoring Mr. Adams' account and advised NBC to file a complaint with the company.

Twitter in turn suspended Mr. Adams's account because it violated one of its own terms of service: Mr. Adams had disclosed an NBC executive's e-mail address on Twitter.

Mr. Macgillivray ordered the account to be restored and posted a public apology to Mr. Adams. It is "unacceptable," he said, for Twitter to scrutinize tweets, though he declined to say whether the offending employee was punished. "We should not and cannot be in the business of proactively monitoring and flagging content, no matter who the user is," he wrote. The explicit mea culpa over the NBC criticism may also have protected Twitter from a lawsuit. Mr. Macgillivray is nothing if not a seasoned corporate lawyer.

This kerfuffle reveals something of the identity crisis that Twitter faces. It is both a gadfly's bullhorn and a valuable stream of business intelligence. And with an $8 billion valuation, its business strategy is being closely watched. Twitter has lately stepped up ways to draw advertising revenue while Wall Street waits for it to go public.

Copyright 2012 The New York Times News Service