I went thorough a 3 hour myspace addiction when I checked my messages every three seconds/minutes while creating this whole thing in my head about certain people. It turns out I was wrong (thank god) and decided that a lot of this info is like gossip. Best left alone and to horny teenagers with extra time. Filling in the gaps (not the good kind) isn’t my strong suit, never has been. I feel for your friend and after reading your article I will be sure to guard my info, because (as I suspected) the community business isn’t gonna protect and serve like the SF Police (kudos btw). I guess buyer beware.

Much respect Ariel and V, as always!

Voicing one’s opinion is one thing, but attacking the character of another is also bullying and beneath contempt.

I’m amazed at how many people live in ivory towers.

btw, I’m not a Pownce fan, either, not in the least (and no offense meant). I have used Twitter more.

I was thinking of using twitter, but I think I’ll use Pownce instead.

That, my friend, is exactly why some believe that this whole issue got blown up in the first place. Congratulations on making their point.

In a former life, I used to do studio catering, and the most unpleasant catering job I ever had to do was when we catered the commercial shoot after the death of Rebecca Schaeffer to ask for the govenor of California to enact stronger laws against stalkers. The whole cast from “My Sister Sam” was there It was like catering a wake. It is my deepest fear that it will require the death of a blogger before companies will take such threats seriously: A multi-million dollar lawsuit against a dot-com company for inaction in the face of an obvious mortal threat. I’m just hoping it will take a lawsuit of stalking and not someone dying before companies do take action.

A note where police are concerned — sometimes, as has been my experience on multiple occasions, they can be worse than useless, and just as unresponsive as Twitter has been. The problem of course is that when the police don’t act, it amplifies your feelings of helplessness by several orders of magnitude.

Last year, my business partner’s entire family was at our office, when a psychopath threatened to kill all of them, including his eight year old sister. The police did absolutely nothing. And that’s only one of my stories; A woman I was seeing was being stalked by her ex, and the police laughed it off. I was also the object of his… obsession. You always remember your first death threat, heh. And I still remember when a very gentle friend of mine was wrestled to the ground by half a dozen police officers and thrown in jail over a case of mistaken identity. When the police realized their error, they didn’t even apologize. My friend was traumatized by the experience, and they did nothing to alleviate the stress they caused him.

The fact is, a lot of people have no where to turn to. Sometimes the system works, but it’s pretty broken in some places, and it’s far from universally accessible. A lot of victims are on their own. Which really sucks.

Your friend deserves more than an apology; she deserves restitution and a guarantee that Twitter will stop users from stalking and threatening people through their website.

Not in your case, obviously. Your google talks about sex as related to search were inspired.

that’s all from me.
chris dorward

As being a vicim of harassment from ages back (nearly ruined the relationship of my then girlfriend, now wife) I came to the conclusion years ago that the police are the only way your going to solve this stuff, you can’t count on the internet to do anything because legally they have no reason to and if anything it makes things 100 times worse as now you not only have your assailant coming after you but much of the morally corrupt internet community thats just a hair more mature than Xbox live jock. Your kidding yourself if any of these people running these services are there for any other reason than making millions of dollars even if they have to screw their mother to do it. Making money and losing your morals go hand in hand.

And yes Twitter needs to issue an apology and fire the idiots they have giving them legal advice. Not only is no one going to sue Twitter and own any of the disgusting comments in court, but no judge is going to allow such a lawsuit to continue. This is just plain chicken on their part. If they seriously view this as a risk, it’s a risk that shows that they value their community and thus its worth taking.

As a non-tech outsider (I am a Corporate Risk Manager in TX) I am astounded at the utter disregard by web 2.0 companies of cyber liability. I guess as with anything like this, it’ll take something like this happening with the attendant legal action and punitive damages before the hip cats of web 2.0 start to take notice.

I’ve lost a lot of respect for a lot of people over this.

This may seem rather naive as I’m not up on the techy world, but couldn’t she or you, for that matter, file a lawsuit against companies that don’t uphold their end of the bargain?

I cannot even begin to describe how much I loathe bullies. If someone ever messed with my gf, they would discover just how tenacious my payback would be.