Popular blogger ignites uproar over Twitter harassment

Some Web enthusiasts find microblogging service Twitter to be addictive because you can say absolutely anything you want–as long as it’s 140 characters or less. So what happens when “saying anything” translates into harassment?

One avid Twitter user, Ariel Waldman, posted an entry this week on her personal blog, declaring that “Twitter refuses to uphold (its) terms of service.”

She said she started receiving “multiple accounts of harassment” from another user of the microblogging service and that when she petitioned to Twitter’s community manager, he opted to remove the Twitter posts in question from the site’s “public timeline.”

Waldman wasn’t satisfied, especially when the harassment allegedly continued and grew worse into 2008. She wanted to see user account bans of those responsible, and despite insisting that the activity was in violation of Twitter’s terms of service, Twitter executives–including CEO Jack Dorsey–repeatedly said it wasn’t.

Some of the comments at issue were apparently posted through a site that allows users to post anonymous “tweets” to a central account, making it difficult to track them to a specific user.

Blogger Ariel Waldman spurred a lively debate when she claimed that Twitter didn’t abide by its own terms of service. She said it refused to take down an account that harassed her.

Waldman is hardly the average Twitter user. Well-known in geek circles, she’s a “social-media insights consultant” who contributes to tech blog Engadget and runs her own site, Shake Well Before Use, about “art, advertising, sex, and technology.”

In other words, in the bubble-like culture of Web 2.0, Waldman is a sort of celebrity–and with celebrity comes scrutiny and often ugly commentary. If Lindsay Lohan took action every time Perez Hilton and his celebrity gossip brethren scrawled “slut” across pictures of her, her lawyer would be working overtime.

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