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).

Community in the comments

I've been sitting on this post for a while to let the dust settle over the buzz and debate that surrounded Flickr's venture into video a couple weeks ago. What I found most interesting from the conversations that erupted across the inteweb was the sense of community (or lack there of) in Flickr and YouTube based on the comments the videos receive and the environment those comments live in.People flock to both YouTube and Flickr for their easy portability that is supported by their simple UI design (read: easy embed codes). The general sense from people who use both Flickr and YouTube is that Flickr would provide a more relevant place to put videos due to there not being a clusterclick of comments. Comments on YouTube are typically stereotyped as being hundreds of negative remarks from users that are largely unknown to the YouTube "community". It's true that YouTube is more about the content than any social networking device, but the known lack of community management over negative and harassing comments on YouTube videos often gives off the same "hopeless mess" feeling as a MySpace profile design.As Scott Beale has stated, "for the most part the comments on Flickr are relevant and add to the conversation, unlike YouTube comments". This can partially be attributed to Flickr's community management, both exerted by the Flickr team and the "self-help" tools like blocking that they provide to make sure that comments aren't spam, harassing, or are just overall unwelcome.Is it the community management or the content that has created a more relevant community? Is it that photography has become more niche than video, and thus feels like a closer-knit community? In ongoing discussions with colleagues about online social interactions ranging from Twitter to Xbox Live, seemingly, the less the feeling of having an active community management system, the less users feel a loyalty to the service, despite if all their friends are using it.

Covert Operation

I've been digging through a lot of my old work this past week and stumbled across a pitch that was a lot of fun to execute. In 2005/2006, my former agency VML received a RFP from Ubisoft to create buzz for their upcoming release of Splinter Cell 4. I had directed a very large brainstorming session for creating various concepts for the pitch. With an incredibly creative and talented team, we came up with some awesomely insane guerrilla ideas to pitch, but we wanted to somehow prove to Ubisoft that we were able to not only create these ideas, but to actually execute them as well. My favorite projects have always been the ones that I've been involved with from creation to execution, and part of the reason I really enjoyed working at VML for so long was to be able to do random things like this.The night before the pitch, Adam Kellogg, Aaron Weidner, and myself flew in to San Francisco and acquired a generator, a $60k projector, and a minivan. The result is this video. Adam edited the video overnight and we presented it the next morning in the pitch (note: this was never meant to be a viral video). At the end of the video, we turned to Ubisoft and said "now, imagine if that was the NSA building" - their jaws dropped. Needless to say, most of our ideas required a budget for bail.

One size does NOT fit all

Recently, there has been a rash of one-size-fits-all services that aim to provide a solution to "managing" various sites like Twitter, Pownce, Tumblr, Jaiku and Facebook all at once. As with most of my rants, they begin on Twitter and then trickle their way into a blog post - and if you've seen some of my tweets, you have seen my personal distaste for these services and the people who use them.There is definitely an increased need to edit down the information influx we receive everyday via email, IM, web apps, etc. There is also definitely the stress of joining all the new sites your friends keep joining. However, just as a recent blog post pointed out the potential resurgence of separating public and not-so-public content, there is also arguably a need to cater which content resonates most with which audience.A quote from 2006 that I often refer back to and has always resonated with me is "the internet favors infinite niches, not one-size-fits-all fare".So, why I think one-size-fits-all services like HelloTxt, Ping.fm, Twhirl, and Mahalo Share are missing the mark:SpamThe one-size services assume your followers and friends are only following you on one site. In reality, most of us go between various different sites as much as we would go between kissing partners at a game of spin the bottle (as Sean has stated, I have a non-proprietary crush on Twitter and Pownce). This mass broadcasting may help you spend less time catering to each site, but will end up filling up all your friends' social inboxes two or three times over with the same content. Undoubtedly, this will annoy them - especially if they really didn't need to see that you're broadcasting live on Qik in 3 different places every 5 minutes.RudenessWorse than a wish-I-could-be-there video award acceptance speech, it's centered around broadcasting without valuing interaction. Almost all people I've observed who use these services to cross-post, rarely ever login to the individual sites to see the replies, nor does it seem like they care. As a result, the content suffers significantly - as people learn to not click through or respond to things where they know their opinion won't be heard.Poor CateringIf not interacting with a community and spamming your friends didn't hinder you enough, the services completely overlook the most important aspect: the content. On Pownce, seeing your 5 latest 140 character @ replies you had on Twitter is completely useless, annoying and a total giveaway to the fact that you're probably never going to take the time to send me that new song you like or point me to a video you wanted to talk about outside of the 5,000 YouTube comments it received. As such, I've most likely already stopped following you.To quote myself from 2006 in reference to advertisers, "So what if you reach a larger ... audience? Did you reach the right audience? There's so much talk about demographics, but in the end, people only care about numbers instead of the effectiveness, no less defining effective influence."Have these microblogging sites given rise to an advertising-like mindset of reaching numbers rather than niches?