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."

Comments

Wow

[Threni]

People really take this shit seriously. Why can't they just say `we don't care. If you think you're being harassed, go to the police. We make no changes to our code, or messages sent over it, without a court order. If you don't like it - stop using our service.`.

Re:Wow

[hansoloaf]

me thinks the "blogger" is just trying to maintain or increase traffic to her site - thinking she's somewhat important.

One interesting tidbit is that she works for Pownce. I do know that this harassment started before she worked for Pownce. Yet I do see that the conflict of interest is in there now if she continues to press her case. She is free to close her twitter account and utilize pownce fully.

Re:Wow

[me at werk]

They'd love to, but when the community manager of Pownce (a twitter clone with a few more features) wants to sully the name of Twitter as Pownce is failing, you've gotta be a loud damsel in distress, don't you?

Related: GetSatisfaction Thread

[Anonymous Coward]

http://getsatisfaction.com/twitter/topics/twitter_refuses_to_uphold_terms_of_service

There are many people posting in this thread, some more ardently than others. Good points are dotted here and there. Of particular note are the two replies from Twitter employees. It's interesting how neither of them pull the "we have no obligation according to the TOS" card and how neither of them make any move to discredit the complaint.

Is silence tantamount to agreement, in this case?

The point is this will lead to bad press

[Basho]

There will no doubt be all sorts of threads here about whether Twitter has to remove content, if people are making too big a deal about this, comparisons to Flickr/YouTube/Microsoft(of course), etc... And of course LOTS of conversations about why Twitter is always down.

But to me the real issue here is simple: This will make people say "If that is the way Twitter treats people, I'm moving on".

A community-building site needs its community, otherwise it is just a php script sitting on a server somewhere. Piss off a vocal part of the community and eventually the tide will turn elsewhere.

The comments that show she's lying.

[me at werk]

There's a good comment there pointing out that this is all a bit of an attention whoring scheme (where's the full disclosure that the blogger crying out works for Pownce, a twitter competitor?), right here.

#

I have a list of 13 tweets that Ariel sent us as examples of the abuse from the account she wanted banned. According to our records, this is everything she sent us, except for those from the âoeconfessionsâ account, which Ariel says was not the main problem. (I couldnâ(TM)t look those up, because the posts themselves were deleted before we could look at them.)

I would *love* to post the whole file of these examples. I think it would clear a lot of things up. Unfortunately, since this content is the source of all this strife, and itâ(TM)s now off the Internet, that seemsâ¦well, not quite right.

What I will tell you is this:

Out of these posts, exactly one mentions Ariel by name. It calls her âoeexperienced.â The others do not personally identify Ariel.

One of them uses the word âoecuntâ (with a quote, presumably from Ariel). None contain either âoecrackâ or âoewhore.â None contain threats, physical or otherwise. Most are insults about physical or personality attributes without referring to anyone specifically. If you were following both Ariel and the account of this woman when these posts were made, it may have been clear who she was referring to. Out of that context, you would probably have no clue. But even if they would have mentioned Ariel by name, most of them are not actionable, because we donâ(TM)t have a rule against insulting people or hurting their feelings.

Caveat: Many of the examples she sent us were from Flickr. I didnâ(TM)t look at all of these, becauseâ¦well, we donâ(TM)t run Flickr.

Our stance is this: We stand by our TOS. We have deleted accounts for abuse of various kinds. We had to make a judgement call here, as one does in all such cases. This didnâ(TM)t meet the bar for being banned, in our opinion.

You can disagree with our judgment call. And thatâ(TM)s fine. But youâ(TM)re choosing to do that without seeing the content, and someone has very carefully painted a picture that has misled many people. (One might ask why Ariel didnâ(TM)t post the full tweets in order to strengthen her case.)

Even if you do disagree with our judgment call, this is not an argument about whether or not weâ(TM)re enforcing our TOS; this is an argument about how we define âoeharassmentâ or âoeabuse.â

THAT IS ALL.
# Evan Williams said on May 23rd, 2008 at 6:45 pm:

One more thing:

@Russ: âoeâ¦a lawsuit, seems to be a concern of yours correct?â

No, not correct. That is a total red herring that was probably constructed to make us look like a cowardly corporation (clever!).

Not that we canâ(TM)t be sued â" sure, we can. But that has not motivated our actions here.

Now the content of the "Ariel says" comment:

# Ariel Waldman Says:
May 23rd, 2008 at 12:52 pm

@ericabiz youâ(TM)re right and I have worked with kosso and thanked him in the past and I very much appreciated his objective understanding of the issue.

I chose not to mention him because the majority of the harassment I reference was created by a different account than the one he had created and I didnâ(TM)t want to drag him through this.

All preserved so that when they try to cover it up, slashdot has a backup.

Re:Sock puppets?

[Anonymous Coward]

> I could be wrong, of course

No, you nailed it, pretty much. The only other thing to add here is that he is utterly and completely convinced that all his problems on Slashdot are the result of a massive conspiracy directed against him personally by Microsoft.

The first few times I saw him make that argument I just sort of chuckled, but he is quite serious. He just knows that he is being modded down by evil agents of Microsoft intent on subverting Slashdot and his own personal freedom of speech.

The idea that he might be incredibly obnoxious to a large percentage of his peers around here has probably never crossed his mind.

It's almost unbelievable, but I think it's true. He does actually believe that.

Re:Important part of TOS

[Mike89]

What I find funny is the complete double-standards of the internet community at large. eg. "OMG, Microsoft banned me because my gamertag seemed offensive, their ToS is stupid as!", then "OMG, Twitter won't enforce their ToS, that's stupid as!".

Re:who gives a shit?

[Basho]

Hm, I don't get your point, really. Twitter is a micro-blogging site, got that. But people post micro-blog postings ( Tweets ) with the intention that someone else will be following those micro-blog posts. That's why I called it a community: people connected to other people.

So if a vocal subset of those people stand by their friends and leave Twitter for WHATEVER reason, the network starts to fall apart - once more people I'm interested in connecting with move elsewhere Twitter will be less interesting to me, and I'm more likely to move, dragging my legion of 29 followers with me...