Twitter gets terms of service, finally
It was never the legendary Wild West of the early Web (as if that ever accurately described the early years, then or in retrospect), but on Wednesday, Twitter gained a list of rules designed to reign in current and future mayhem.
Twitter's been flapping along with the sparsest of Terms of Service for quite some time now. No more: On Wednesday, Twitter support team lead Crystal posted a list of rules of the road.
Stating that the service respects individuals' ownership of their own tweets, the ToS now states, "We do not actively monitor user's content and will not censor user content, except in limited circumstances described below." They're pretty ordinary circumstances: privacy, threats of violence, copyright infringement (a tricky proposition in 140 characters, but doable), name squatting, malware propagation -- in other words, the usual.
The section on spam, however, is designed to address the fairly unique nature of Twitter spam, where it's not the deluge of messages that's annoying but the falseness of the sender her/him/itself. Stating that they reserve the right to change what's considered spammy behavior as the spammers come up with new tricks, Twitter's ToS lists seven factors that might indicate to the service that an account is mainly a vehicle for spam.
To some extent, Twitter will rely on the ecosystem to self-regulate -- two of the seven indicators involve other users blocking your posts or complaining that you're spamming. Two more flags involve follow patterns -- following far too many people in too brief a time, and having proportionally too few followers (a restriction that seems mostly to be an invitation for spammers to gang up and follow each other). Only three involve actual content -- a preponderance of links, duplicate content over multiple accounts, and reporting content without attribution.
One rule, which forbids impersonation ("You may not impersonate others through the Twitter service in a manner that does or is intended to mislead, confuse, or deceive others"), is interesting considering Twitter's lively fictional-character subculture. Real-life celebrities, on the other hand, will doubtless greet the codification of that rules with joy: Levar Burton, for one, tweeted just two days ago that "There ought to be Twittermandments like, 'Thou Shall NOT covet any @name That's NOT Your Own!!!!'" And anything that improves the world of the Reading Rainbow guy improves the world at large -- even if it's only 140 characters in size.