Opposing Opinion: The @arielwaldman twitter story
By David Fisher. Filed in social media |Tags: ariel, ariel waldman, digg, foulbastard, harassment, twitter, waldman
It’s been all over Digg, CNet and Slashdot. Summize can let you see some of the chatter. In short, someone was harassing @arielwaldman on twitter via calling her names and using some anonymous services. She complained, and they removed the posts from the public timeline. They didn’t do enough so she blogged about it. Now there’s this big uproar. I have a few thoughts on it that seem to differ from the crowd.
First let’s be clear about a few things. Once you put yourself out there on the internet enough, people will talk shit about you. I think everyone understands that. I have some friends that are in social media that try to lay low for this very reason. If you have 3000+ followers on Twitter, you’re likely starting to edge on being semi well known on the internet, or at least on Twitter. If Ariel thinks that this is some shit, you should look at some of the comments that people make about iJustine on YouTube.
Maybe what should have been first, is that I don’t think anyone should be harassed. I’m not for insulting comments or personal attacks. Just if you’re out there enough it will happen. This is to be expected sadly.
What I simply don’t get however is that everyone is acting as if Twitter doesn’t ban anyone for any reason. They do. They have. They will do it again. @foulbastard (who is pretty awesome) was banned for his “Breasts of Twitter” collage/stunt. It took a while to reinstate him, but he’s back now and only slightly tamer than before.
I also have a hunch that she may have made such a big deal of this, not to have a topic to blog about, but rather to increase her social media presence. Her followers have nearly doubled now and she’s almost at 4,000 followers total. I think she was at 2,220 or so when she initially complained about this.
Twitter should remove things if someone posts stuff like, your social security number, home address, phone number, etc… Asides from that. It’s the internet. If someone calls you a “cunt” as was one of the insults apparently, then well… it’s the internet and you should get over it.
The great thing about twitter is that you can ignore people! You can not follow them!
As another matter alltogether is the censorship vs not censorship thing. Companies get trashed on all the time for stopping some communication, reasonable or not. I feel that this headline could have just as easily been, “Twitter censors users!” if @ev and others had taken greater action. For example Microsoft was getting slammed the other day for removing an Xbox Live player’s account that was named “Gaywood”, as it says clearly in their terms of service that anything seeming sexual, etc would be banned. It happens that it’s the guy’s last name. People flamed Microsoft for being so kneejerk and 1984ish. People- make up your minds what you want. Should the companies do any censorship, or leave everything open?