Twitter refuses to uphold Terms of Service
arielwaldman.com
arielwaldman.com
What solution do you propose?
I more than anything just felt bad for someone whose life is so shallow and joyless that they actually care enough to put that much effort into hurting someone they don't even know because they were offended by some trivial thing he said on the internet. I have to believe that a person who would undertake that sort of campaign probably has serious depression and other mental health issues. I can hardly be upset at them given that. The emotional pain that they're trying (and failing) to inflict on me is the same they live with every day.
Short of threats of violence, who really cares? (I've had those too, which I turned over to the FBI, though nothing really came of that.)
Sure, so would I - but does it help much if some insane person tries to destroy your life? Insane to me means they are pretty much capable of anything. Glad it worked out well for you, but maybe it is different from person to person?
I can't really comment further, though, as I haven't had something like that happen to me.
But just people calling me names? I can't find any compelling reason to even care.
I was (unsurprisingly?) disappointed.
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?
Wait until the word spreads. It won't be pretty.
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.
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.
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?
If I didn't read things like hacker news I would have no idea what twitter was.
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.
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!)
Everybody is free to join, though - hardly the mark of an elite circle.
You might hear a lot of complaints about twitter-the-company, but twitter-the-service is generally regarded highly.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.