Twitter Behaving Badly
I’m not going to write a massive post on the topic, as much more eloquent people than I already have. However, I’ll explain the essence of it. Twitter user Arial Waldman described recently in her blog the harassment she’s received via that service. Harassment that violates Twitter’s Terms of Service, mind you. Yet when she continued to file reports to the company about her harassment, eventually finally talking to the CEO himself, Twitter did the opposite of what one would expect. They refused to ban the user, and instead are merely changing their TOS.
Twitter is a fun, useful service. But if it allows itself to become a place where harassment (pretty lewd stuff, at that) is allowed, then I can’t imagine it’ll stay in use forever. Wake up, guys, you need to protect your users.
[Edit: Two new things I've learned since this entry went up. First, Arial is part of the Pownce team. While I won't say outright that working for the competition could have been a factor, it does bring the validity of the situation into question. Secondly, as Twitter team members stated, both sides of the story hadn't been told and they offer their viewpoint of the situation here. I don't know what to make of the situation, but it's clear that if harassment is happening that Twitter needs to follow up on their threats and ban such people.]
For Twitter’s side of the story, here’s their official response to the situation at their blog: http://blog.twitter.com/2008/05/twitter-enforces-tos-cares-about-users.html