NET RESULTS:WHO'S HE, when he's at home? Or to update that to the Noughties: who's s/he when s/he tweets on Twitter? In an online world obsessed with social media, owning your own name can be important, and (unintentionally) ceding it to someone else problematic, writes KARLIN LILLINGTON
Consider the world of Twitter, the 140-character mass messaging (or for the digerati: “micro-blogging”) free social media service. Already a fast-growth phenomenon with millions of users (between February of 2008 and 2009, it grew by 1,382 per cent, according to ratings services Nielsen), it blasted into the online user stratosphere recently when Oprah signed up and started tweeting to the world.
By comparison, Nielsen said, hugely popular online profile site Facebook grew at 228 per cent during the same period. How funky is a world in which 228 per cent annual expansion qualifies as modest? But back to Twitter.
Setting aside the Big O, other celeb Twits include Stephen Fry, Ashton Kutcher, Demi Moore, basketball star Shaquille O’Neal, and various other actors, sports figures, singers and rappers, as well as people who are simply celebs as a full-time job and have no other obvious “talent”.
Some Twitterers have more than a million people “following” them (which in Twitterspeak means people who sign up to receive every precious tweet emanating from the person). Tweets can be read online or sent to your mobile. Anyone can sign up for Twitter, choose a username, and begin tweeting.
For some, that’s exactly the problem. There are no rules or requirements, or perhaps more importantly, ways of enforcing that a Twitterer is who he or she claims to be. I could sign up and claim to be the pope (who, after all, already uses Facebook) or Mary McAleese or Jordan.
There’s a whole subculture now of fake Twitterers. Some are fake fictional characters; not many people will be stupid enough to assume they are reading tweets from, say, the real Darth Vader.
But the fake Darth is pretty darn funny. Sample Darth tweet: “Guys night in. Had Fett send out for Bantha Burgers while we watch pod races on pay-per-view. Blowing up a small moon later.” You can follow His Darkness at www.twitter.com/darthvader.
As for the “real” fake people: some Twitter accounts are fairly obvious fakes, with people having a bit of a gentle-to-cruel laugh at another’s expense. Among the fake Twitterers, count Condoleezza Rice, Vladimir Putin, Bill Clinton, David Hasselhoff, David Letterman and many others. There are even fake accounts to try to encourage the real people to set up a real Twitter account (as with Steve Colbert).
But then there are the fake accounts that make the real people very, very angry. For example, Tony La Russa, manager of the St Louis Cardinals baseball team, has sued Twitter over a fake account. His complaint was that some tasteless tweets were “derogatory and demeaning”, and damaged La Russa’s trademark rights, according to a lawsuit filed in California.
Not unexpectedly, an announcement came from Twitter over the weekend that the company will soon offer “verified accounts” that will come complete with a seal of authenticity to guarantee a Twitterer is who he or she claims to be.
Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said in a blog post (I guess a sequence of 140-character tweets would have been too tedious) that they’d start by making the accounts available to public officials, musicians, sports figures and others particularly vulnerable to impersonation.
Businesses are to follow as the service is rolled out.
The need for such an approach shows how tricky the area of ascertaining identity online is. Whatever the old New Yorker line about how, on the net, no one knows you’re a dog – how do you know Oprah is actually Oprah? And for businesses like Twitter, based around being a person/personality online in a self-publishing medium, what legal liability do you have to make sure individuals aren’t defamed and libelled by those using your service? And what entitlement, if any, do individuals have to own their own name online?
In the area of domain name registration, there is a mechanism – albeit slow and clumsy – to resolve domain name disputes. One can appeal to the WIPO Arbitration and Mediation Center to argue a domain name should not belong to another individual – generally someone “cybersquatting” on the domain to get an individual or company to pay them for it.
It’s possible to do this with domain names because domains need to be formally registered and eventually the owner generally can be tracked down through the registration process.
With social media services like Twitter, this would be extremely difficult. Closing an account – as has happened with the fake Tony La Russa Twitterer – seems right now to be the only feasible response to halt the tweets. But that doesn’t necessarily remove a wider liability. If the La Russa suit goes to court, case law will begin to establish how these odd new online frontiers are to be managed, if at all.
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