Jul
3
Twitter Porn and Spam?
I interrupt my 12 Days of Twitter posts with this brief rant (even though this is also about Twitter).
Ah….
Being a geek is such a wonderful thing because we early adopt and there is nothing quite as special as when it’s just us. I’ve seen it with usenet, blogging. I’ve seen it with podcasting and now I’m seeing it with Twitter. When it’s just us, we may not agree on everything, but we tend to like each other anyway. Geeks have no expectation that the world work according to our rules because most of us didn’t grow up with the world working that way.
When a communications breaks through to popular culture that’s a great thing and I root for that to happen, but as soon as I start hearing all the nonsense about the dangers that this new technology is bringing to our culture, I roll my eyes and start regretting the fact that we didn’t keep this to ourselves. A couple of years ago, The Ad Counsel released an audio spot for radio warning parents about Podcasting and how it promotes marijuana use. Well, that was just silly and today MediaPost.com brings us a new round of noob silliness.
The piece is titled, “Marketers Call For Twitter To Filter Content For Pornography, Spam,” and you can begin snickering with me now. The premise of the piece is that marketers are calling on Twitter to filter out pornography and spam because those two things make marketers uncomfortable. Marketers want to take advantage of Twitter to promote their goods and services, but they fear that if they do, they’ll be associated with the cesspool of porn and spam that is the Twitterverse. Give me a break! Here’s a quote:
“Paul Verna, senior analyst at eMarketer, believes Twitter will need to find a way to filter out adult content because marketers will feel uncomfortable having their products and services, or advertising and marketing materials, serving up alongside — or anywhere near — it.”
The solution to spam and porn on Twitter is super simple and it’s user controlled. I you get spammed with porn or unwanted marketing material, UNFOLLOW. If that doesn’t work, BLOCK the sender. It’s that simple. Let’s finally have a service that lets adults be adults and parents be parents. I don’t need Twitter to protect me with filters because they’ve given me the tools I need to protect myself.
Sarah Perez responded to the MediaPost.com piece on ReadWriteWeb by suggesting that Twitter filter out marketers. She says, “if anyone’s to blame for spamming our Twitter timelines, it’s the marketers themselves. They’ve managed to trick our friends into spamming us with their messages instead.” She then goes on to illustrate how marketers ARE responsible for spam through their use of Tweet to Win campaigns.
@sarahintampa, you’ve got an amen from me.
