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tweets twitter

A Tweet Too Far

Ariel Waldman’s “Twitter Refuses to Uphold Terms of Service” makes a disturbing read and a depressing revelation.

To summarize: Twitter’s Terms of Service (TOS), modeled on Flickr’s, forbid one Twitter user to harass another. If you harass, you lose your account, according to the TOS. Yet Twitter user Ariel Waldman experienced painfully offensive harassment from another Twitter user for months. Unable to make him stop or to get help through normal Twitter channels, she escalated the issue to Twitter’s CEO and asked him to fulfill Twitter’s Terms of Service, i.e. to warn or ban the harasser. Instead of dealing with the harassment, the CEO decided to alter Twitter’s TOS. (Alter them to what, one wonders.)

Disappointing.

One expects corporations to behave in cowardly and callowly self-interested ways, but one expects more from one’s heroes and friends.

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[tags]arielwaldman, twitter, TOS[/tags]

L. Jeffrey Zeldman's avatar

By L. Jeffrey Zeldman

“King of Web Standards”—Businessweek. Ava’s dad. Automattician. OG blogger/web designer. Publisher, A List Apart & A Book Apart. Author, Designing with Web Standards & Taking Your Talent to the Web. Emeritus: An Event Apart, SVA MFA IXD, Happy Cog.

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