Researching online behavior

My frequency of blogging has gone down lately. Is it because of the pervasiveness of microblogging? For the most part, no. The answer is that I'm consuming a LOT more information than outputting, which leaves little time to share all the great things I'm learning about at the end of the day.A great book I'm currently reading is The Psychology of the Internet by Patricia Wallace. The last edition was from 2001, so a lot has changed, but it takes on concepts and issues that exist and are still considered progressive today. So far, the book provides great insights into the reasons behind a lot of online behavior. Another great book I'm digging into is How to Think Like a Computer Scientist: Learning with Python. I'm by no means a developer, but I'm insatiably hungry to learn new things, so I've been toying around with the very basics of Python for fun. I definitely recommend this book if you have no experience with coding.Another type of research I've been casually looking into is my referral links from Google that won't reveal your name, but will reveal what search terms you typed in to get to my site. Here's just a sample few:"I have a friend who is being stalked and harassed""can the state or federal courts stop a stalker from continually using the courts to continue his stalking and harassment?""why internet harassment in work should be bad""aol tos me when i was being harassed""how to harass someone on twitter""can i file a harassment suit if i'm being harassed over the phone?""can a banned user sue?""twitter safety stalking""my employer sent me some random item after firing me, can i sue for harrassment?""isp tos violations liability case""can you give a cease and desist letter for someone stalking you on the internet""i'm being stalked how do use a private mail box as my physical address""can someone be arrested for identity theft for less than $60""when harasser starts more trouble after restraining order is giving""does twitter track ip addresses""twitter.com is not responding in a sane manner"That is just a small sample of things people are looking to find out more about. It really hits me hard when I see that someone came to my site after typing into Google that they're being stalked or harassed and are looking for resources.Cyberstalking and harassment on-and-offline has been an ongoing topic I've talked with people about for years. From helping build site architecture and standards to sharing stories and screencaps, the one insight I have is that there is not enough awareness or education about these issues. Often times, people have good intentions with building sites and services, but may simply overlook taking these into consideration. Other times, I have read very gut-wrenching interactions. A personal example is when I have discussed publicly about being stalked. Some women decided to assume that I was delicately-skinned about mean blog comments and that I was grossly misusing the term "stalker" instead of them taking the time to *ask* me if their assumptions were correct (at which point I would've explained the long-term offline threat to my physical safety and that I had contacted the authorities before, but had chosen not to disclose those details in a blog post).Of the resources that do exist, almost all are geared towards children and parenting. An interesting resource I stumbled across recently is a Teach Digital wiki about "Safe Digital Social Networking (DSN) -or- Proactive Approaches to Address Cyberbullying and Digital Social Networking". I would love to work on a resource guide for these types of issues that expands the reach beyond just children.Other interesting things I've been reading through (thanks to my lawgeek friend) include various laws concerning online behavior. Some great ones to follow are:

• "The 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals today upheld a lower court ruling striking down the controversial Child Online Protection Act (COPA) that required Web operators to restrict access to large amounts of constitutionally protected speech.  COPA placed severe restrictions on a wide range of legal, socially valuable speech, including content relating to sexual identity, health and art. CDT, which has filed friend-of-the-court briefs opposing COPA and supporting parental empowerment technology, applauds the ruling. July 22, 2008"
• New Missouri law on online harassment and cyberstalking.

There are a ton of other things I'm consuming lately (not all of them so "dark"), but this has turned out to be a long post already! Hopefully I can get back into a more regular blogging routine again soon.

Twitter responds

Wow, totally did not expect today to be as overwhelming as it was. There are a lot of things being thrown around, some valid and others completely nonsensical, so I'd like to clear a few of them up (hoping to be less long-winded than my last post).

Twitter did respond, twice on Get Satisfaction, first here and then here. The general reaction seems mixed with some people satisfied by Twitter's response while others are not. A lot of the friction seems to be around how Twitter should be perceived. A decent portion of Twitter users see the service as a community (similar to Flickr), while Twitter chooses to view themselves as a "communication utility" (similar to AT&T). But ultimately, this is an issue of accountability. And Twitter's strategy of revising their Terms of Service rather than living up to the agreements they made with users is troubling.

To be clear, it wasn't my intention to bring a mob with pitchforks to Twitter's door. I don't believe in mob-rule and again, I like Twitter and the people who work there.It was my intention to speak out about a community management issue and to focus on the decisions a company made. I did not write this to "cry", "whine", or be "insecure" about being called a "c---". To put it bluntly, I'm not and I certainly don't let things like this ruin my day. I feel like it's a prerequisite for any blogger or person who puts themselves "out there" to have a thick skin. Yes, the reality of the internet is dealing with these issues - Violet Blue has a great post called "Every girl online is fat, ugly and unsexy. Here's how to get over it". If I didn't feel like I could "deal" with these issues, I wouldn't be involved in any of the things I am.

The issue *is* about the decisions that were made and answers I was given directly from Twitter. It didn't seem like they had a process or policy to their TOS and did not handle it as well as other services had. Overall, it came off as inexperience with community management issues.

Admittedly, a couple of Ev's tweets were off-putting, but this was a rough day and I don't think that anyone was very happy by the end of it. I feel that some of his frustration may be from the fact that a number of people (both publicly and privately) told me cases where Twitter had banned a user for more extreme violations. In my post, I outline that in my phone conversation with Jack:

I asked Jack if Twitter had ever dealt with stalkers or banning people before and he told me they never had.

It was pretty clear in conversation and I remember being shocked about that fact afterwards. Neither here nor there, it seems to be a miscommunication, and I'm glad people are sharing their different experiences with me.This has generated SO many opinions, and I very much appreciate the critical and supportive sides to this. It's extremely inspiring that people feel as passionately about these topics as I do, whether or not they agree with me or Twitter.

So, I'm not quite sure yet where this leaves everything. As stated earlier, it seems to come down to a disagreement over how some people view Twitter and how they view themselves.

(Note: I turned comments off on the last blog post, because after 276 comments and your own mother finally chiming in at the end, there's probably little else to say that hasn't already been said). (Comments are now closed on this post as well).

Update: Copying and pasting from my last post for those not wanting to click-through: This is already disclosed in the about section of this blog already, but I am stating it again here at the request of others: I am the community manager for Pownce, however, this issue started before I was working at Pownce. The opinions stated here do not reflect my clients/employers and I did *not* write this in the interest of them. It is well known that I am not a Twitter-hater (much the opposite).

Twitter refuses to uphold Terms of Service

Update 3: Please see my follow-up post about Twitter's response.

I started using Twitter in March 2007, just before their SXSW explosion. Not surprisingly, I instantly became addicted and since then have used the service for everything from personal to professional.

Overall, Twitter is a great platform to connect with friends and co-workers and it felt safe in an "everyone knows everyone" sort of way in the beginning. However, as with any social network that continues to grow (especially one that focuses on broadcasting messages to the masses), it opens itself up to the prospect of abuse, harassment, spam, and other types of typical Terms of Service violations. Considering the social network-sphere as it exists today, most people would assume that Twitter would be prepared to react and take action against TOS violations - their TOS page even states

"(These terms of service were inspired, with permission, by Flickr.)" - Flickr being well-known for taking action on TOS violations, even when the violations are debatable.

As I found out last month, the reality of Twitter is that they refuse to warn and/or ban people who use their service to "abuse, harass, threaten, impersonate or intimidate other Twitter users" (to quote their fourth line item on their TOS page). What does this mean? In short, anyone can use Twitter to consistently harass you and ruin search results for your identity and Twitter won't execute any means of community management.In June 2007, I unfortunately found myself on the receiving end of multiple accounts of harassment from a user on Twitter. When the user started using my full name in their harassing tweets, I reported the harassment as a form of cyberbullying to Twitter's community manager and received a response that let me know they cared about the situation:

"[We] have decided, as a preemptive measure, to remove [the user's] updates from the public timeline. ... If you have anymore problems with [this user], please let us know right away, we're here to help :)"

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:

"Since this is an ongoing case and due to the nature of the content, I think this person is clearly violating Twitter's TOS and I find it necessary for Twitter to uphold to this: "4. You must not abuse, harass, threaten, impersonate or intimidate other Twitter users." Honestly, I believe this harassment has gotten way out of hand for too long. I am writing to you and to Twitter to remove this user for consistent long-term harassment."

Twitter responded after 3 days:

"Unfortunately, although [this user's] behavior is admittedly mean, [s/he] isn't necessarily doing anything against our terms of service. I've been following [their] profile since your first complaint to monitor [them], as well. We can't remove [this user's] profile or ban [this user's] IP address; [they're] not doing anything illegal."

To which I replied (at which point, Jack, Twitter's CEO was copied):

"I don't believe this is a case of illegal activity - this is a clear case of harassment which is outlined in your TOS.To be blunt, I find that someone using your service to call me a "cunt" in a public forum is defined as harassment. Again, your TOS states:"4. You must not abuse, harass, threaten, impersonate or intimidate other Twitter users."It's Twitter's responsibility to uphold the TOS, otherwise the TOS has no meaning."

At this point, Jack responded requesting a phone discussion about the issue. My notes from the phone call on March 19:

I told Jack that it the harassment has escalated and that it was a very clear violation of their TOS and that I had had similar cases of harassment on Flickr in which Flickr took down all 3 of the harassing accounts. I asked Jack if Twitter had ever dealt with stalkers or banning people before and he told me they never had. Jack explained that they're scared to ban someone because they're scared if it turned into a lawsuit that they are too small of a company to handle it.

Jack additionally explained that their TOS was up for interpretation, to which I responded that it isn't. I explained that it clearly states "You must not harass other Twitter users" and that harassment is defined as continuous small attacks, which this is.

Jack then asked me about what other social networks had done. I said that Flickr deleted all the profiles and that services like Digg and Pownce don't think twice about banning abusive or harassing users because it's part of the TOS. (Note: Flickr is known for asking users to take down content and/or banning accounts that might even very loosely be *considered* as harassment, which, again, I find interesting, considering at the end of Twitter's TOS, it states: "(These terms of service were inspired, with permission, by Flickr.)").

Jack asked me what good it would do to ban my stalker since it seemed obvious that the stalker would continue to stalk me elsewhere. I told him that it was not his nor Twitter's responsibility nor business to stop my stalker, but that it was very much their responsibility to identify users violating their TOS on their own service and take action accordingly.

At the end of the conversation, Jack asked me "well, what would be a happy resolution for you?". I responded saying that seeing the user who is consistently harassing me banned. I told him that I totally support Twitter and want to see them do well and was trying to understand their fear of getting sued, so I said that at the "EXTREMELY least" that Twitter needed to send the user harassing me a warning, that Twitter didn't owe the user any information other than the fact that they had been reported as violating their TOS and to cease or be banned. I very much stressed that Twitter needs to send users violating TOS a warning at the very least if they don't ban. Jack then said he would need to talk to their lawyers about that and would get back to me by the end of the next week.

Jack didn't get back to me until I emailed him on April 9 with 8 new instances of abuse that included my full name and email address, attached to words like "crack-whore" and "lesbian porn", to which he emailed me back a response:

"Ariel,
Apologies for the delay here. We've reviewed the matter and decided it's not in our best interest to get involved. We've tasked our lawyers with a full review and update of our TOS.Thank you for your patience and understanding and good luck with resolving the problem.
Best,
Jack."

Thanks, Twitter. It's great to know that your Terms of Service that you force everyone to agree to don't mean anything.

Update: I've also started a topic on Get Satisfaction about the issue that also outlines how Twitter's excuse of being sued holds no ground under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.

Update 2: This is already disclosed in the about section of this blog already, but I am stating it again here at the request of others: I am the community manager for Pownce, however, this issue started before I was working at Pownce. The opinions stated here do not reflect my clients/employers and I did *not* write this in the interest of them. It is well known that I am not a Twitter-hater (much the opposite).