On Friday, Twitter announced its new look as well as some updated guidelines. There was one guideline in particular that raised questions for online publishers.

Don’t: Use screenshots of other people’s profiles or Tweets without their permission.

But following requests from techcrunch.com for clarification, Twitter indicated that these rules are not aimed at the news media, in print or online.

This isn’t a new part of the policy and was stated in the guidelines before. This serves primarily to protect users from their tweets being used as endorsements without their knowledge. Public tweets are public. But if you’re going to use tweets in static form (e.g. in a publication), you should have permission from the author/user. For instance, if someone famous were to tweet about liking something and then it was used on a billboard.

This doesn’t apply to broadcast — there are separate display guidelines about that. Our policies also don’t attempt to control the appropriate use of tweets in news reporting.