That's not harassment...

[daveon]

I read with interest a post on John Scalzi's blog yesterday and then read, with growing horror, the comments.

So near as I can tell, a particularly nasty piece of work from the Skeptic world who calls himself @ElevatorGate on Twitter (or did anyway) after the events in the elevator at a Skeptic Convention, has found a new game of stalking women (and some men) who hold opinions he (I'm assuming here) objects to and uses a Social Tool called Storify to store what they've said and then notify them.

Now, firstly, I actually think Storify is a cool tool, used as intended it's pretty interesting what it can be used for.  Used as this twerp is it's downright creepy.

Things came to a head when various women asked the CEO of Storify to do something about the aforementioned Twerp and he basically said there was nothing he could do, they said the things in public and therefore they couldn't object to having them stored.  Well, yes and no to that one, more in a moment, but then the blithering idiot told them that in a Twitter post where rather than just mentioning user ElevatorGate, where he may or may not notice even with a Twitter search, he used the construction @elevatorgate making damn sure he got a notification.  Even worse, this CEO of a social networking company claimed that he didn't really do that.

Reading the comments on Scalzi's blog there's a bunch of nitwits who've come along to try out variations on the 'it's free speech' argument and as the women (and some men) said these things in public they were getting what they deserved and if they didn't like it they could get off the internet.  Additionally, a bunch of them, turning into barrack room lawyers explained that what was being done wasn't stalking, wasn't harassment and shouldn't be judged in those terms.

So, here are my thoughts:

1. It's creepy, stalkery and harassment. Any real world analogue of what this creep is doing would fall into the broad spectrum of things I'd have words with somebody about doing to me or mine.  Here I extend my privilege of being what is euphemistically known as a 'big bloke'.
2. Is it legal?  Dunno, don't care, see point (1)
3. Is it infringing free speech to block his activities on Storify.  Nope.  It's up to them.  If I were CEO of a Startup like this I'd have yanked his account citing the relevant part of their Terms and Conditions relating to stalking, harassment and douche behaviour.
4. Saying that you see no evidence that ElevatorGate is using his social footprint to point out people to harass would mean more if a bunch of people hadn't turned up on Scalzi's blog to defend them...

tl:dr version: If somebody is doing something online that would be odd or unpleasant in the real world then they shouldn't do it online, and the answer is not telling the victims to get offline if they don't like it.

Comments

[vicarage.livejournal.com]

On traditional publishing platforms, like newspapers, the editor is at the top of a pyramid of contributors and sub-editors we expect all to have responsibility for nasty content. But common carriers like the telephone and post have no such obligation.

Social media sites are like the latter, and while I agree they should have T&Cs that allow them to pull what they like, they should have no obligation to do so, and you should think no worse of them if they don't. The T&Cs should say "we reserve the right to pull all content without explanation", and not have a morality section, as that invites people to push the boundaries.

So the Storify CEO should have been pragmatic and pulled the content, but not waded into the battle.

I don't like the wave of bullying stories who's tone is SOMETHING MUST BE DONE, as the something always seems to be new laws and new censorship.

The world needs more tolerance, and the acceptance that idiots are best ignored, not suppressed.

[daveon.livejournal.com]

John, the issue here is that it just isn't all that practical on some of these services to ignore idiots. It's not like setting a Spam filter, and at the crux of this problem is that Storify doesn't have anything that lets you ignore it. If you want to use Storify then you'll get a Twitter notification every time EG 'Storifys' you, and from what I'm reading, that's a lot. Then his mates come and spam your list.

Yes you can press ignore, but as some of the victims have pointed out, that can involve doing it several thousand times thus rendering Twitter basically useless and forcing the victims off line.

I prefer to think of what's being done as more like a personal DOS attack.

[vicarage.livejournal.com]

Not being a twitter person, is it that EG is advertising your name in a message he writes, which forces a notitifcation on you. He writes loads of such messages, and when other people repeat them you get even more notifications?

Do they appear to come from a Storify account, not EG?

Can you block a twitter source or have twitter spam filters?

[daveon.livejournal.com]

So the sequence is this: EG stores blocks of related conversations from Twitter on Storify - it's designed to pull in all the Tweets related to a topic and present them as a narrative.

When one of your Tweets is Storified, you get a notification from Storify that you've been indexed.

@ElevatorGate was suspended from Twitter for abusing their standards, so they've moved to sucking out public information from Twitter and then using Storify to notify people who follow him (some of them being their own nasty pieces of work based on some searches I did this morning) that he's indexed somebody. Some of these people are getting it done to them all the time.

Twitter doesn't really have Spam Filters and while you can block/ban people from your feed, it's a manual process so a few dozen people having a pop at you can effectively kill your Twitter stream.

[vicarage.livejournal.com]

For a multi-tweet Story, do you get notified multiple times, one for each tweet?

and each time his minions refer to a Story, the original person is notified again?

It strikes me these systems have dreadful design, but then Twitter and FB always seemed designed to amplify content, not filter it, which is why I never generate content on them.

[daveon.livejournal.com]

I think you only get notified once per story, but it sounds like he's basically archiving every Tweet some of these people make so they're getting multiple notices a day of this guy recording what they do.

Short version, they do amplify content by design, but that's no reason to be a douche while using them because you can.

[chris-gerrib.livejournal.com]

I thought the best analogy to this was that it's perfectly legal to take pictures of somebody in public. If you take pictures of people in various public places and then mail them a copy, it's called stalking.

[daveon.livejournal.com]

Well, there's also the element of following them around in public places and taking pictures too. It's not like you just happen to be there....