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"If you had to choose, would you rather Twitter get its act together on uptime issues, or mediate all the disputes that arise between members of the community at large?\nBased on the buzz in the blogosphere the last several days, I'm getting some severely mixed signals. On the one hand, you have folks saying that all their new venture capital should be devoted purely to making themselves stable. On the other hand, you have this whole cadre of folks that have cropped up in the last several hours behind the banner of Ariel Waldman essentially saying that Twitter should focus on community building and legalese.\nIn case you've missed the tempest in the teacup, the latest uproar over Twitter has surprisingly very little to do with uptime, and everything to do with the use of a number of four-letter words in connection to a blogger. Ariel Waldman, who's resume includes workplaces like Suicide Girls, Engadget, Pownce and AdRants, has had something of a problem with a fellow Twitterer engaging in abusive behavior over Twitter:\n\"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\u2019s community manager.\"\n[...]\n\"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.\"\n\"Unfortunately, in 2008 it escalated to a level that could no longer be ignored. Tweets were being fired off directly calling me a \u201Ccunt\u201D amongst other harassing language. On March 14, I wrote to Twitter, giving the example URLs of abuse and stated to them clearly...\"\nThe obvious solution to the problem for Ariel suggested by those I've talked to over the matter is for her to simply block the offender.\u00A0 The handy little button has become useful for me when those who wish to debate me on the system for whatever reason can't seem to rise above ad hominem. It prevents the other user from reading my feed when logged in, and prevents any tweets from that individual from showing up in my timeline view.\nThis solution, however, isn't good enough for Ariel, as she is less concerned with being cyberbullied, and more concerned with reputation management. For her, it was untenable that this feed would be indexed by Google, and therefore searches for her full name would show up with references to the various offensive four letter words:\n\"...as mentioned in other people's responses, I would hate to have my reputation with a potential employer marred by even a whiff of slander or libel from an enemy's tweet. To be somewhat misanthropic (though I prefer \"realistic\"): I trust myself to filter, but I don't trust everyone else to do the same.\"\nThis is an issue I have a lot of experience in dealing with, both personally, and from a perspective of analysis. Just the other day, here at Mashable, I analyzed the inconsistencies in the YouTube terms of service, in which I exposed where you can be banned from the system for talking bad about terrorists, but if you are an actual terrorist, you're allowed to broadcast unfettered and unrestrained, in clear violation of the YouTube terms of service.\nInterestingly enough, I was generally flayed on that article in the comments and around the blogosphere for even suggesting that a terrorist should have his free speech restrained. Much like that situation, though, I predict that I'm going to be flayed yet again for taking a position that advocates a modicum of free speech here, because my reccomendation for Ariel is to learn to live with it.\nSetting aside any points I'm itching to make at the irony that murdering terrorists get more quarter in the Web 2.0 world than \"cyberbullies,\" the bottom line is that \"the Internet was founded on Hate and Pornography,\" as my friend Art likes to say.\nIt's true, though. Few people will deny that pornography is a sizable chunk of the Internet, least of all someone who works for Suicide Girls. Hate is just as much an equal founding father, though, as folks who've been around the 'Net as long as I have can attest to. Ever since the September that Never Ended, teaching folks Nettiquette has been a losing battle. Trolls, griefers, script kiddies, spammers and folks that are just plain asses are a fact of life here.\u00A0 I won't rehash the sociology behind all that; if you haven't heard it all before, the resources are easily available if you use the right keywords.\nAside from my years of experience with jerks on the Internet, I've occasionally been that jerk.\u00A0 One of the joys of having a domain name with an age of close to a decade is that you have a decent amount of Google juice.\u00A0 When a landlord comes over and starts an altercation with your 9-month pregnant wife, for instance, a simple blog post outlining the pertinent details can create a world of PR damage for that individual.\nIn that sense, I understand the concerns of Ariel, and why she would rather not have that sort of derogatory information pop up about her when a Google search is done on her name. But much like the situation for celebrities constantly having tripe published in gossip rags about them, particularly visible New Media players like her are considerably more prone to this type of character besmirchment than the average bear.\nGiven that she has a load of experience in PR, particularly in relationship to social media, clearly the better move than to start a war spanning two years with Twitter over legalese would be to put out a short post on a public forum like her blog that contained the offending keywords with an explanation or level-headed response, of sorts.\nInstead, she's very visibly turned a few very short insults into a public character assasination on Twitter and their community management expertise. If downplaying or eliminating the traces of these insults was the goal, all she's succeeded in doing was making them headline news. Bottom line, for a potential employer (which was her apparent concern in the first place), she's shown herself to be someone who's not averse to making a mountain out of a relative molehill."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2008/05/22/ariel-waldman/>