Colin Carmichael maintains there is no such thing as Twitter spam. Colin recently asked friends on Twitter to send him their thoughts on this. He has published some of the responses, including mine, on his blog.
I think he is well intentioned, but his arguments are simplistic and miss the mark.
Spam is generally thought of as unwanted marketing email, but in an environment like Twitter, where email plays such a trivial role, spam is harder to define, so I employ the broader definition of spam as "forced, unwanted marketing messages."
I am not referring to Twitter's notification emails when I say Twitter has spam. I am talking about the interaction that occurs when someone follows you on Twitter, and the ways in which information gathered about you from Twitter can be used.
Upon receiving a new follower, the majority of Twitter users validate that follower by checking their profile. Colin says there is "no reason beyond ego or sheer curiosity to check out folks who follow you." Nonsense. Twitter is many things, among them a social network. Every social network has a procedure and etiquette for adding connections. Of course I am going to see if a new follower is someone I should follow back. I'm there to have conversations. That implies two-way communications.
We all make decisions on Twitter regarding who we follow back. Many people who follow us are friends, colleagues, business partners, people in an allied field. When I am followed by someone, I check out who they are before deciding whether to follow back, and that's when I find that @toshibaflat (no longer active, but I was followed by this user) is advertising for a flat screen. I have now received an overt, unwanted marketing message.
Colin proposes that you can't prevent a Google search, but what does he imagine people are doing when they try to learn about you through search? Lots of Google searches are done by bots who then spam you if you were unfortunate enough to have your email address published somewhere. It is not the fact that someone is following you, or doing Google searches on you, that is problematic. It is what they do with the information they gather.
Privacy is a delicate matter covered by both law and convention. Colin sees the expectation of privacy as simply meaning "you published the information on what you knew was a public forum and therefore should have no expectation of privacy." (Paraphrasing, not quoting.) That is a logical non-sequitur. What matters is not that the information is publicly available, but what people do with that information.
If I publish a contact email address on my blog, is it OK for people to send me emails promoting porn and Cialis? Of course not.
And just because something does not violate the letter of the law, does not mean it is ethical, or that it does not violate privacy. If your house is close to the street and I stand on the sidewalk and stare into your window, and observe your private life because you left the curtains open, that is perfectly legal, but is also very creepy.
The problem here is confusing Twitter's Terms of Service with reasonable behavior and respect. It's sad, really, that we use semantics to excuse bad behavior. But most Twitter users just plain don't like spam, in whatever form, including being followed by purely commercial entities. And that should count for something.
Tags: twitter spam, colin carmichael, privcay
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