Legal Research

Twitter, RT and Porn

By scott

Two articles on the subject of Twitter have caught my eye today, both concerning aspects of advertising. The first article by Phil Bradley asks whether Twitter’s ‘Re-Tweet’ functionality could and is starting to be exploited to an extent where it will effectively kill Twitter. Phil highlights the growing use by companies of all sorts asking users to Re-Tweet a message and/or add certain #hashtag to be in with a chance of winning ’some piece of tat or the other’.

According to Phil this results in three problems:

1 ? Multiple re-tweets of same post in your timeline.
2 ? Contamination of ‘Trends’ section.
3 ? Possible swamping of companies getting people to people constantly tweet and re-tweet nonsensical messages.

Thankfully the re-tweeting that goes on in my timeline tends to be people re-tweeting interesting content and not marketing rubbish, but I can see how it could become a problem unless twitter introduces a filter/block for this type of content.

The second article by Laurie Sullivan on Media Post does kind of fit in with Phil’s as it is about ‘legitimate’ marketers complaining that Twitter is starting to be taken over by spam, porn, and escort services. According to Sullivan, ‘marketers relying on the site to promote family values tied to goods and services don’t seem too thrilled’.

I have to admit this made me smile. Why I would be any happier having these marketers trying to spam me more than I am of porn or other spam messages, I don’t know. I’m not really sure where the complaint is. Are they worried that some porn accounts/escorts are ‘following’ them? For starters, I’m pretty sure escorts buy stuff too. Are they worried that people with nothing better to do that go through pages and pages of ‘followers’ lists are going to see/click on one of these types of followers and go ? oh no ‘ pure and innocent product’ is being followed by @hotxxx, therefore they must be evil or associated with porn?

If it isn’t that then all they have to do is not follow these people back. All very easy. I only follow about half those that follow me, partly it is because I don’t think I have anything in common with them, and partly it is because it when I see an account like this I just ignore it. However, if someone chooses to follow this ‘person’ then that’s their decision.

For me, the issue is spam. It doesn’t matter who is creating it or what the content is. I don’t personally have a problem with porn or escorts on Twitter -I follow US porn star jessica drake. If all Twitter does is starts to make it easier for marketers to use the service, without adding effective means of allowing users to block/filter their content, to keep this and other content out, then people will just move elsewhere.

Full post as published by Information Overload on July 03, 2009 (boomark / email).