On Tuesday Adam Wagner, a British human rights lawyer and law professor, wrote a tweet thread in response to a BBC article (“Priti Patel outlines measures to curtail disruptive activists’ travel“). Here’s the eight-tweet thread:

This is a highly illiberal measure. Preventing people exercising their free-speech rights in advance because they are ‘disruptive’ is fraught with risk for a democratic society. https://t.co/ZFpP83Qviv pic.twitter.com/EKNJgYAAfb

— Adam Wagner (@AdamWagner1) October 5, 2021

Wagner wouldn’t have been surprised to see one or more of these tweets embedded in a news article. That’s generally considered fair use. But he was surprised to see them appear on the Daily Mail’s website in the form of a sidebar to this piece, with no mention of their provenance, accompanied by his headshot.

Hey @MailOnline I don't mind you (or anyone) reproducing my tweets, which are publicly available, but turning a Twitter thread into an *opinion piece* without my permission goes a bit farhttps://t.co/5RSOnBBHgb pic.twitter.com/WxX04ZRfRz

— Adam Wagner (@AdamWagner1) October 5, 2021

“They regularly use my tweets in articles, which is fine,” Wagner told me via DM. “I accept that when I tweet anyone can quote from the tweet as long as it is attributed — but this is something new.” (The Daily Mail did not immediately respond to my request for comment.)

The response from Wagner’s Twitter followers was swift: Make ’em pay! When Wagner complained to them, the Mail temporarily replaced the tweets-in-a-column with his headshot and bio. They also agreed to pay a fee, and the tweets went back up — they’re now printed directly in the body of the article.

The fee? £250 (USD $340.99 at 0.73 pounds to the dollar, or the equivalent of 114 people paying $2.99 each for Twitter Super Follows). “They offered £100 but I suggested they take into account that what they did was probably illegal,” Wagner said, “and they agreed immediately.”

With eight tweets in the original thread, that works out to $42.62 per tweet, which is really not bad for a morning’s tweetage.

I'd rather see Adam get paid than Twitter. Unless you mean Twitter would pass on payment to the user whose tweets are lifted?

Daily Mail aside, the balance of power is already too much towards platforms at the expense of news sites, I'd argue.

— Sam Wilkin (@MrSamWilkin) October 5, 2021

unrolling the twitter thread right into the CMS https://t.co/rrRMtzE9zK

— Brandon Hardin (@hardin) October 5, 2021