Blogger Incites Outcry Over Twitter Harassment

CNet is reporting that one blogger has started an outcry about harassment as it applies to Twitter. While their written stance appears to support the safeguarding of abuse, Twitter appears to be waffling on the issue when it comes to the hard line of enforcement. "The final response to Waldman's complaint from Twitter co-founder Biz Stone asserted that "Twitter is a communication utility, not a mediator of content," and that "Twitter recognizes that it is not skilled at judging content disputes between individuals. Determining the line between update and insult is not something that Twitter, nor a crowd, would do well. Stone added that Twitter's team would continue talking about which situations were appropriate for account banning."

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Important part of TOS

[conlaw]

As stated in TFA, Twitter's TOS includes the following:

[Twitter] may, but have no obligation to, remove content and accounts containing content that we determine in our sole discretion are unlawful, offensive, threatening, libelous, defamatory, obscene, or otherwise objectionable or violates any party's intellectual property, or these terms of use.

In other words, they've left themselves an out for claims such as these.

Re:Nothing massive here.

[Kalriath]

You are on the losing side the free software battle and making things worse for yourself. Battle? What battle? You know, I've never even seen the Free Software Foundation try to claim there's some kind of battle. Yet you (and folks like PJ at Groklaw) seem to believe that Freedom of Choice in software is good, so long as it's the same as your choice.

And before you trot out the "M$ Shill" line, no I don't get paid by Microsoft. I work for the government in my country, and we're encouraged to consider Open Source in our "purchasing" decisions, and in fact we even use it - our IT department even encourages Firefox usage (because, well, IE is bloody difficult to use!) and our government has even proposed RFCs and contributes to Open Source itself.