TwitterStalked
Cold, sweating hands.
Fluttering heart.
Upset stomach.
Nervous pacing around the house.
All classic signs of a fight-or-flight response. Triggered by one hundred forty characters of text on a computer screen.
Many people don’t like twitter. They say it’s boring, or no big deal. Others don’t revile it, but don’t see it as much of an asset either. Somehow, through sharing and reading little blocks of text, sometimes with Web links attached, I’ve met a close friend and mentor in my field, a fantastic--and most importantly, local--massage therapist with skills to meet my body’s needs, and dozens of entertaining and intelligent people. I even met a neighbor from one street over.
His tweet of “OMG we live near each other” came after he realized that we’d been at a conference together, before which he’d seen me walking my dog. Further-private-correspondence revealed how close together we actually live-in the same housing complex.
When a stranger calls your best friend a hooker, and implies that you and she are tag-teaming your husband, Twitter becomes much less rosy. At first I thought these tweets, nasty as they were, were spam-in the same category as random offers of free IPhones, get-rich-quick schemes, or diet plans.
A glance at the twitter profile-it’s gone now, and for reasons I’ll explain in a minute I wouldn’t give it to you even if it wasn’t-revealed that this was no random spammer. All tweets but one in the recently created account were aimed at the three of us. Twitter aficionados might wonder why it took me half a week to notice these tweets. The bully-tweeter was talking about us without the requisite at sign (@) that would alert us that we were being mentioned. Subtlety seemed to be the name of the game-in approach, not content-until the tweeter started replying to tweets with nasty comments, including in their reply whomever had been mentioned in the original tweet. I was less than thrilled to have people I have affiliated with professionally see these landers.
What was particularly scary about this tweeter was that they clearly had private information about us, information few people know. Would this be a juicier story if I told you? Quite probably, but things are private (that is, not public) for a reason. Please take my word for it that having a stranger tell you something that you know but they shouldn’t is freaky! I still feel a strong sense of threat.
WE don’t know who this person is. I personally think the name and twitter profile were both made up. Which part of the person being a woman, book lover, sports fan, engineer, and resident of a Midwestern city is true I couldn’t even begin to guess. Is it someone we know? Could be. Likely is. Either that, or it’s a case of technological invasion. It’s always possible that some random hacker broke into our twitter accounts and read private messages. Passwords have been changed. Trying to figure it out made me a little crazy. I have declared a psychologically necessary moratorium on speculating or fearing their return. The account was deleted, either by the user, or by Twitter itself after repeated abuse reports from all of us.
It’s a strange sensation, to feel pursued by a faceless, voiceless, electronically-propelled stranger. The United States Code defines harassment as : "a course of conduct directed at a specific person that causes substantial emotional distress in such a person and serves no legitimate purpose (Title 18 Subsection 1514(c)1.” Yet harassment on Twitter was determined by one judge to fall under the rubric of free speech. The definition of assault given by the legal dictionary at TheFreeDictionary.com, “The act required for an assault must be overt. Although words alone are insufficient, they might create an assault when coupled with some action that indicates the ability to carry out the threat.” On the receiving end, words feel like threats. If someone knows so much about me, what else do they know? The fear from this kind of harassment is mainly a fear of escalation. I’ve felt it before, when I was being pursued on the phone as young teenager. IN that case, we mostly knew who the pursuers were, and the harassing quality was-mostly-just that the calls always came, sometimes at prescribed times, sometimes randomly.
So I can recognize this fear of escalation, sense of invasion, and, of course, anger at the insults I referred to above. Yet these seem such amorphous fears. One side of me says I must be creating drama, seeing threat where there isn’t any-but all I was doing was going around my tweeting business, one block of text at a time.
Twitter users are very familiar with reporting spam. Reporting abuse of Twitter’s privacy and content rules is a different process altogether.
Here’s info on both:
How To Report Spam On Twitter
How to Report Violations On Twitter
This has been my entry for therealljidol.
Fluttering heart.
Upset stomach.
Nervous pacing around the house.
All classic signs of a fight-or-flight response. Triggered by one hundred forty characters of text on a computer screen.
Many people don’t like twitter. They say it’s boring, or no big deal. Others don’t revile it, but don’t see it as much of an asset either. Somehow, through sharing and reading little blocks of text, sometimes with Web links attached, I’ve met a close friend and mentor in my field, a fantastic--and most importantly, local--massage therapist with skills to meet my body’s needs, and dozens of entertaining and intelligent people. I even met a neighbor from one street over.
His tweet of “OMG we live near each other” came after he realized that we’d been at a conference together, before which he’d seen me walking my dog. Further-private-correspondence revealed how close together we actually live-in the same housing complex.
When a stranger calls your best friend a hooker, and implies that you and she are tag-teaming your husband, Twitter becomes much less rosy. At first I thought these tweets, nasty as they were, were spam-in the same category as random offers of free IPhones, get-rich-quick schemes, or diet plans.
A glance at the twitter profile-it’s gone now, and for reasons I’ll explain in a minute I wouldn’t give it to you even if it wasn’t-revealed that this was no random spammer. All tweets but one in the recently created account were aimed at the three of us. Twitter aficionados might wonder why it took me half a week to notice these tweets. The bully-tweeter was talking about us without the requisite at sign (@) that would alert us that we were being mentioned. Subtlety seemed to be the name of the game-in approach, not content-until the tweeter started replying to tweets with nasty comments, including in their reply whomever had been mentioned in the original tweet. I was less than thrilled to have people I have affiliated with professionally see these landers.
What was particularly scary about this tweeter was that they clearly had private information about us, information few people know. Would this be a juicier story if I told you? Quite probably, but things are private (that is, not public) for a reason. Please take my word for it that having a stranger tell you something that you know but they shouldn’t is freaky! I still feel a strong sense of threat.
WE don’t know who this person is. I personally think the name and twitter profile were both made up. Which part of the person being a woman, book lover, sports fan, engineer, and resident of a Midwestern city is true I couldn’t even begin to guess. Is it someone we know? Could be. Likely is. Either that, or it’s a case of technological invasion. It’s always possible that some random hacker broke into our twitter accounts and read private messages. Passwords have been changed. Trying to figure it out made me a little crazy. I have declared a psychologically necessary moratorium on speculating or fearing their return. The account was deleted, either by the user, or by Twitter itself after repeated abuse reports from all of us.
It’s a strange sensation, to feel pursued by a faceless, voiceless, electronically-propelled stranger. The United States Code defines harassment as : "a course of conduct directed at a specific person that causes substantial emotional distress in such a person and serves no legitimate purpose (Title 18 Subsection 1514(c)1.” Yet harassment on Twitter was determined by one judge to fall under the rubric of free speech. The definition of assault given by the legal dictionary at TheFreeDictionary.com, “The act required for an assault must be overt. Although words alone are insufficient, they might create an assault when coupled with some action that indicates the ability to carry out the threat.” On the receiving end, words feel like threats. If someone knows so much about me, what else do they know? The fear from this kind of harassment is mainly a fear of escalation. I’ve felt it before, when I was being pursued on the phone as young teenager. IN that case, we mostly knew who the pursuers were, and the harassing quality was-mostly-just that the calls always came, sometimes at prescribed times, sometimes randomly.
So I can recognize this fear of escalation, sense of invasion, and, of course, anger at the insults I referred to above. Yet these seem such amorphous fears. One side of me says I must be creating drama, seeing threat where there isn’t any-but all I was doing was going around my tweeting business, one block of text at a time.
Twitter users are very familiar with reporting spam. Reporting abuse of Twitter’s privacy and content rules is a different process altogether.
Here’s info on both:
How To Report Spam On Twitter
How to Report Violations On Twitter
This has been my entry for therealljidol.