Twitter Waffles On TOS, Treats It Like A Game of Darts

The Twitterverse was all aflutter over the past 24 hours or so as Twitter was used as a venue for online harassment. As soon as I started seeing the harassment accusations flying across my screen in Twhirl (my desktop Twitter client of choice) I thought about the blogstorm over Kathy Sierra last year.

I first became aware of the accusations of harassment indirectly - one of my Twitter follows, Mary Wallace, was discussing it with one of her follows. At first I ignored their conversation, but as it progressed and became more and more vehement, I tuned in. It seems that Twitter user Ariel Waldman was being harassed by another Twitter user.

I started clicking through the Tweets about the issue to see what was going on, and found myself on the fence about the issue. No one likes to be called names, and name calling is just uncalled for online, but thanks to the anonymity of the internet and the tendency of people to be jerks when they can do so without fear of reprisal, it does happen. Just ask Kathy Sierra.

Part of this post is about my surprise that such a tempest was kicked up in a teapot over this. Were the names she was called hurtful and terrible? Yes. Was the harasser persistent? Yes. Would the bullying have died down had it been ignored? I believe that gets a yes as well. I thought the same when Kathy Sierra was facing her harasser last year.

In addition to the actual issue of harassment of Ariel Waldman you get the secondary issue of how Twitter handled the problem. When reports started pouring in to Twitter that a user was having a problem, they chose first to respond by not responding, sticking to the status quo. Then they did a strange thing, changing their existing TOS to cover their own behinds.

Now, I don't actually think Twitter has any responsibility in this situation unless it were to escalate to physical threats. So the fact that they had such a non-response at first didn't ring any bells with me. Once they chose to waffle on their TOS, however, they got my full and undivided attention.

One of the few things an intangible internet company has that makes it valid is their Terms of Service (TOS). It is the roadmap for their users on what is and what is not acceptable use of their site or service, and a guideline to behavior.

Twitter has already been under fire lately for not enforcing the "no spammers" aspect of their original TOS. This recent change only adds fuel to that fire. Toss in the frequent outages that have the top percentage of users so enraged, the problems with scalability with third party apps and the user interface, and Twitter has a public relations issue on their hands.

Free service or not, consistency is key. Instead of throwing TOS terms at the issues as if they were playing darts, Twitter needs to make a statement about the issues they are facing sooner rather than later, or they risk losing their user base to FriendFeed, FaceBook or any number of other applications standing in the wings waiting for Twitter to die.