Twitter refuses to uphold Terms of Service

http://arielwaldman.com/2008/05/22/twitter-refuses-to-uphold-terms-of-service/

by epi0Bauqu • 18 years ago

54 32 18 years ago

nuggien• 18 years ago

I can't remember the last time I heard anything positive about twitter. And yet people are still addicted to it like crack.

axod• 18 years ago

Who is? Seems like only people who blog a lot or are part of the web2.0 social elite circle.

If I didn't read things like hacker news I would have no idea what twitter was.

KirinDave• 18 years ago

It's quite popular among some hacker circles. It's generally a useful service.

I'd say the majority of people aren't devoted fanatically to it like the fame-on-a-budget blogger2.0 crowd is. People like Arrington are so frantic about Twitter because it's become of their better platforms for building a user base. When it goes down, their business actually suffers, crazy as that seems.

For me, it's just a sidechannel to organize meetings (like at a conference) or a place to find/report interesting papers/posts/manuals/libraries. I think the majority of twitter users are like me in this regard: we aren't defining a metric of success by how many Twitter followers we have. In this capacity I find it acceptable, and the downtime is only a minor nuisance that I often don't notice because I just don't tweet that often.

zach• 18 years ago

Those are the new early adopters. Services that appeal to the blogerati and their particular quirks get endless free publicity.

Services aimed at everybody have a much higher hurdle to getting that kind of publicity, and forget entirely about services aimed at web novices. Those have to go after print publicity (oh the horror!)

Tichy4• 18 years ago

"the web2.0 social elite circle"

Everybody is free to join, though - hardly the mark of an elite circle.

dcurtis• 18 years ago

I love twitter. I think it's an awesome service. The problem is the company behind the service.

You might hear a lot of complaints about twitter-the-company, but twitter-the-service is generally regarded highly.

Xichekolas• 18 years ago

To abuse your metaphor, I can't remember the last time I heard anything positive about crack either, and yet...

When your users are so hooked that they act like twitchy crack fiends, you probably have a winning product, assuming you can execute (which is what people are complaining about) and monetize (eventually).

xlnt2• 18 years ago

That cunt should get a life. Jesus Christ, just go die.

Twitter is right. They shouldn't ban people for swearing.

If this guy has a real complaint he should focus on that instead of his stupid, anti-free-speech complaint.

krschultz2• 18 years ago

There is no right to free speech in forums. The forum or a service like twitter are some one else's property. While you have the right to say what you want in public, I don't have to let you stand on MY front lawn if you want to spout hate speech. But if you stand in the street there is nothing I can do about it. Same thing here, Twitter is under no obligation to allow you to say what you want, they own the sand box and they set the rules. Apparently they just don't the gumption to enforce them.

xlnt2• 18 years ago

Umm. It's twitter's decision. Twitter decided. This person -- who has a problem with free expression -- thinks twitter decided wrong. And then misleads about what happened -- e.g., saying twitter won't enforce ToS when actually they just don't want free speech banned on their site.

andyangelos• 18 years ago

Another reason why users should leave Twitter and migrate to other services like Pownce. Suprisingly, the author of this post is a staff member of Pownce :)

I noticed an appropriate tweet summarizes this debate: "biz: Yesterday pizza was sent to Twitter HQ by friendly twitterers and today it's a keg of beer from @Mister_Robotics THANKS!"

The Twitter staff is apparently content eating pizza, drinking beer, and spending a freshly minted $15 million.

alex_c• 18 years ago

This seems... strange to me. Users are the life and blood of services like Twitter; I would do everything in my power to keep my users happy and protect them from harassment. I'd rather lose one abusive user than many good users.

The lawsuit explanation, especially, seems strange. I know threatening to sue is a common past-time for certain internet users (even though chances are they don't know what they're talking about and couldn't afford it anyway), but has anyone ever successfully sued a service for banning them?

Hexstream• 18 years ago

I predict those kinds of problems will only get worse and more numerous on Twitter because going easy on assholes and not standing up against them for the benefit of your good users is a great way to send a message that you "want" more of the former and less of the latter.

Wait until the word spreads. It won't be pretty.

raganwald2• 18 years ago

This is exactly what Paul was talking about with respect to Trolls in a public forum. Right or wrong, difficult or easy, it is this simple: if the incentives favour the trolls and disfavour the polite users, the trolls drive the polite users out.

tptacek2• 18 years ago

Is this seriously a whole blog post with 190+ comments about what happened when someone was called a "cunt" on Twitter? Because if that's enough to launch a blog with, I'm kicking myself for actually trying to come up with real content.

motoko2• 18 years ago

Why blog? You can launch an entire media empire by calling celebrities fat.

Tichy4• 18 years ago

I assume you have not been a victim of such attacks yourself yet?

What solution do you propose?

tptacek2• 18 years ago

I'm not sure I see the problem that demands a solution here.

mattmaroon4• 18 years ago

I've definitely been a victim of such "attacks" (though not on Twitter). The solution is to be more emotionally stable than a 5 year old and not care if someone calls you names.

astrec• 18 years ago

I had hoped to read a cracking debate about whether Twitter should be considered a service, a community, or merely a service around which loosely coupled communities had formed, and the obligations implied by each for Twitter inc.

I was (unsurprisingly?) disappointed.

menloparkbum• 18 years ago

Poor twitter. They can't get a break. I'm surprised that most commenters on the various sites seem to automatically assume that harassment did occur and the offending user should be banned. The complaint was lodged by Pownce's community manager and in no blog post were any of the offending "Tweets" reposted, so everything seemed a bit fishy to me. I assumed I could just go view her timeline to judge for myself, but when I tried to do that, twitter broke.

I hope that chronically broken sites populated by censorship proponents aren't really the future of the internet. It makes me think sites like YTMND are actually performing a noble service to humanity.

motoko2• 18 years ago

YTMND, as much of a depressing window into humanity, also has some good artistic content.

Look at http://ytmnd.com/users/Click/sites.

Also, YTMND is as "indy" and "legitimate" as a website can be: just some kid who got lucky making something people liked. This is much unlike the SF echo chamber.

forgotmyaccount• 18 years ago

Nobody here fucking gets it.

If Twitter moderates any legal content, they are no longer protected under the Telecommunications Act of 1996 as a communications service provider and are instead a publisher, which makes them directly liable for any user's libelous statements even if they didn't know about them.

epi0Bauqu• 18 years ago

I assume you are referring to Section 230 of the CDA: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communicatio...

To qualify Twitter just needs to be a "passive conduit" of the information. I believe the case law has defined this (in Twitter's context) to roughly mean as long as they do not actively monitor and screen content, then they are a passive conduit. That is, I do not believe an irate customer pointing out harassment, and then Twitter shutting the perpetrator off in response to that harassmanet, would undermine their CDA exemption in any way.

I haven't looked at this in a few years, so if there is more recent case law, please enlighten me.

raganwald2• 18 years ago

So how does Flickr get away with moderating content and banning users?

How does Hacker News get away with moderating conetnt and banning users?

How does Reddit get away with moderating content reported as spam?

How do any of these sites get away with banning porn or spam?

mattmaroon4• 18 years ago

Yeah, I feel like he must be misunderstanding a law there. Otherwise the economic viability of much of the web goes out the window.

humanlever• 18 years ago

Twitter's posted a response at http://blog.twitter.com/2008/05/twitter-enforces-tos-cares-a...

Twitter refuses to uphold Terms of Service

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