Online Harassment Complaint Hounds Twitter

A polarized discussion has been taking place about Twitter user Ariel Waldman, who went public about a harassment complaint she says wasn’t handled properly.

One one side, you have Twitter employees and some of their supporters, who suggest the affair was overblown, and people were incited to swarm Twitter like a mob.

On the other side, Waldman, who says she has been harassed repeatedly across a range of online venues. She feels her harasser violated Twitter’s terms of service, and should have had their account deleted.

The Twitter blog (and founder Evan Williams, in comments on other blogs) maintain that the specific posts only mentioned the complainant once by name, and did not violate the terms of service.

To add a bit of edge to the exchange, Waldman is the community manager at Pownce, a service that competes with Twitter.