Twitter dances on the edge of very dangerous territory

If you never followed the Kathy Sierra debacle then go quickly catch up on this one, then start following the saga of Ariel Waldman.

Kathy Sierra who has been silent for far too long at the hands of trolls and people who were truly evil is just one example of when otherwise good social networking goes bad.

Ariel Waldman is now on that list of folks who is dealing with a very unfriendly secret stalker who is following her via Twitter. Twitter rather than deal with the issue directly and banning the user has decided to do nothing about the issue and rewrite their terms of service rather than enforce it. That essentially means that twitter is now giving a green light to a big pile of badness that is going to descend on the service, if they refuse to reign in folks who are clearly harassing other members of their service.

The harassment continued throughout the course of 2007. Since Twitter and I had an open dialog started, I would periodically report cases of continuing harassment (some of which spread between Flickr and Twitter). Twitter would take no action while Flickr would immediately ban and remove all traces of the harassment. Unfortunately, in 2008 it escalated to a level that could no longer be ignored. Tweets were being fired off directly calling me a “cunt” amongst other harassing language. On March 14, I wrote to Twitter, giving the example URLs of abuse and stated to them clearly: Source: Ariel Waldman

While web 2.0 is generally a wonderful thing, this type of behavior is nothing new, the idea of harassment even to the point of death (MySpace Suicide Debacle) means that as community managers, regardless of how you look at yourself, service or whatever, the enforcement of the Terms of Service essentially becomes an obligation if you state what is and what is not acceptable behavior. If you say “no harassment” then you have to believe and act on what people are calling harassment. You as a community manager might think it is trivial, but to the person who is believing they are being harassed, then it is a very real issue to them.

Not saying that Ariel has thin skin, putting up with an uncomfortable situation for a year all the while reporting it is also interesting, and not saying this is bad, it just shows that she is committed to the Twitter service. Twitter stands to lose a customer because of someone else, that customer will talk, and if Twitter is perceived as a haven for trolls, trogs, and other Internet miscreants, they will have people who will drop their accounts, stop using the service, and they will lose customers.

Can twitter afford to be seen as a haven for Internet miscreants?

Do they want to be seen as a haven for Internet miscreants?

All good questions, and if they rewrite their TOS (Terms of Service) to remove section 4, then they probably are going to do themselves more reputational harm than they will be doing things well. Even the phone company will help you track down someone who makes threatening harassing phone calls so you can report them to the police. For twitter to do any less than this could cause them reputational damage that they can not afford.

Tags: twitter, harassment, ariel waldman, kathy sierra, troll, Internet, service