Twitter's controversy over Terms of Service
By Jacqui Cheng | Published: May 26, 2008 - 10:26AM CT
Microblogging/social messaging service Twitter has become the center of a new debate about online harassment and what services' responsibilities are the protect their users. What started out as the fairly run-of-the-mill harassment of a female user has turned into a much larger controversy over terms of service, the definition of a community, and what protections the site might have under the law.
He said, she said
The sequence of events began like this: Ariel Waldman, now community manager for Twitter competitor Pownce (but was apparently not in this position when the issue began) became the subject of what she characterizes as harassing "tweets" (140-character messages sent to the service, usually broadcast to the public) last June containing her full name, e-mail address, and disturbing comments. At that time, she reported it to Twitter's community manager, who subsequently removed the offending user's updates.
According to Waldman's blog, she continued to be harassed for the remainder of the year, while the harassment began to spread between both Twitter and Flickr. Flickr reportedly banned the user in question and removed all instances of harassment, while Twitter did nothing in response to her attempts to report them until sometime this March.
The company finally responded at that time, simply stating that the user was unquestionably "mean" but that since nothing illegal had been done, the account would not be banned.
.it is lying dead 
