pfanderson's dashboard

When @haikutwaiku first appeared on Twitter I followed them. Then I saw what they were doing with stealing people's tweets and making it appear that they come from them. Stealing MY tweets.

I sent @messages to them asking to stop. No response. I sent messages to Twitter support staff asking questions about it. I unfollowed them. That did not help. I asked more questions. I was told to block them. I think they were the first account I actually really blocked.

I thought that worked, but it didn't - instead of scraping from my account, they scraped from twemes. I tried to block them on twemes, but it only blocks them from results in my searches, not for anyone else.

I asked repeatedly for the @haikutwaiku spambot to be one of the many accounts Twitter blocks and deletes. I find it incredibly ironic and shameful that Twitter deletes as spam accounts of good decent folk, and then refuses to block an account like this, when so many of the haiku authors have begged for it.

Does Twitter realize that according to copyright law, if we authors allow the scraping to continue without objecting to it, that places our poems, our haiku, our creative content in the public domain without recourse to copyright law or protection? If we want to do that and choose to do that, that would be one thing, but to have loss of authorship rights and intellectual property rights FORCED on us because of Twitter's inability to respond to complaints about the account is likely to eventually result in a two-pronged suit -- 1) against the thief, and 2) against Twitter for facilitating and supporting the theft. Right now Twitter is just lucky that the people who have been victimized by this either don't have the money for a suit or are CC types who are willing to share (even if they didn't intend to share quite so extensively as is happening).

Twitter doesn't seem to be doing much about scrapers in general. I have trouble sometimes tracking a tweet back to its original author.
Folks, pay attention. You've had a lot of complaints about this account (@haikutwaiku). A lot of the "contributing authors" have blocked the account. You say you are working on the broader issue of spam accounts. You kill off other accounts (including ones I actually DO want to read!). Then you need to deal with this, the right way, in a timely fashion. Please. We poets and haiku writers tend to be basically nice folks, generally speaking. Someone else who gets scraped might not be so patient, and when that happens you will have left yourself wide open for a lawsuit by contributing to the problem when it is reported.

When @haikutwaiku first appeared on Twitter I followed them. Then I saw what they were doing with stealing people's tweets and making it appear that they come from them. Stealing MY tweets.

I sent @messages to them asking to stop. No response. I sent messages to Twitter support staff asking questions about it. I unfollowed them. That did not help. I asked more questions. I was told to block them. I think they were the first account I actually really blocked.

I thought that worked, but it didn't - instead of scraping from my account, they scraped from twemes. I tried to block them on twemes, but it only blocks them from results in my searches, not for anyone else.

I asked repeatedly for the @haikutwaiku spambot to be one of the many accounts Twitter blocks and deletes. I find it incredibly ironic and shameful that Twitter deletes as spam accounts of good decent folk, and then refuses to block an account like this, when so many of the haiku authors have begged for it.

Does Twitter realize that according to copyright law, if we authors allow the scraping to continue without objecting to it, that places our poems, our haiku, our creative content in the public domain without recourse to copyright law or protection? If we want to do that and choose to do that, that would be one thing, but to have loss of authorship rights and intellectual property rights FORCED on us because of Twitter's inability to respond to complaints about the account is likely to eventually result in a two-pronged suit -- 1) against the thief, and 2) against Twitter for facilitating and supporting the theft. Right now Twitter is just lucky that the people who have been victimized by this either don't have the money for a suit or are CC types who are willing to share (even if they didn't intend to share quite so extensively as is happening).

Twitter doesn't seem to be doing much about scrapers in general. I have trouble sometimes tracking a tweet back to its original author.
Folks, pay attention. You've had a lot of complaints about this account (@haikutwaiku). A lot of the "contributing authors" have blocked the account. You say you are working on the broader issue of spam accounts. You kill off other accounts (including ones I actually DO want to read!). Then you need to deal with this, the right way, in a timely fashion. Please. We poets and haiku writers tend to be basically nice folks, generally speaking. Someone else who gets scraped might not be so patient, and when that happens you will have left yourself wide open for a lawsuit by contributing to the problem when it is reported.

When @haikutwaiku first appeared on Twitter I followed them. Then I saw what they were doing with stealing people's tweets and making it appear that they come from them. Stealing MY tweets.

I sent @messages to them asking to stop. No response. I sent messages to Twitter support staff asking questions about it. I unfollowed them. That did not help. I asked more questions. I was told to block them. I think they were the first account I actually really blocked.

I thought that worked, but it didn't - instead of scraping from my account, they scraped from twemes. I tried to block them on twemes, but it only blocks them from results in my searches, not for anyone else.

I asked repeatedly for the @haikutwaiku spambot to be one of the many accounts Twitter blocks and deletes. I find it incredibly ironic and shameful that Twitter deletes as spam accounts of good decent folk, and then refuses to block an account like this, when so many of the haiku authors have begged for it.

Does Twitter realize that according to copyright law, if we authors allow the scraping to continue without objecting to it, that places our poems, our haiku, our creative content in the public domain without recourse to copyright law or protection? If we want to do that and choose to do that, that would be one thing, but to have loss of authorship rights and intellectual property rights FORCED on us because of Twitter's inability to respond to complaints about the account is likely to eventually result in a two-pronged suit -- 1) against the thief, and 2) against Twitter for facilitating and supporting the theft. Right now Twitter is just lucky that the people who have been victimized by this either don't have the money for a suit or are CC types who are willing to share (even if they didn't intend to share quite so extensively as is happening).

Twitter doesn't seem to be doing much about scrapers in general. I have trouble sometimes tracking a tweet back to its original author.
Folks, pay attention. You've had a lot of complaints about this account (@haikutwaiku). A lot of the "contributing authors" have blocked the account. You say you are working on the broader issue of spam accounts. You kill off other accounts (including ones I actually DO want to read!). Then you need to deal with this, the right way, in a timely fashion. Please. We poets and haiku writers tend to be basically nice folks, generally speaking. Someone else who gets scraped might not be so patient, and when that happens you will have left yourself wide open for a lawsuit by contributing to the problem when it is reported.

When @haikutwaiku first appeared on Twitter I followed them. Then I saw what they were doing with stealing people's tweets and making it appear that they come from them. Stealing MY tweets.

I sent @messages to them asking to stop. No response. I sent messages to Twitter support staff asking questions about it. I unfollowed them. That did not help. I asked more questions. I was told to block them. I think they were the first account I actually really blocked.

I thought that worked, but it didn't - instead of scraping from my account, they scraped from twemes. I tried to block them on twemes, but it only blocks them from results in my searches, not for anyone else.

I asked repeatedly for the @haikutwaiku spambot to be one of the many accounts Twitter blocks and deletes. I find it incredibly ironic and shameful that Twitter deletes as spam accounts of good decent folk, and then refuses to block an account like this, when so many of the haiku authors have begged for it.

Does Twitter realize that according to copyright law, if we authors allow the scraping to continue without objecting to it, that places our poems, our haiku, our creative content in the public domain without recourse to copyright law or protection? If we want to do that and choose to do that, that would be one thing, but to have loss of authorship rights and intellectual property rights FORCED on us because of Twitter's inability to respond to complaints about the account is likely to eventually result in a two-pronged suit -- 1) against the thief, and 2) against Twitter for facilitating and supporting the theft. Right now Twitter is just lucky that the people who have been victimized by this either don't have the money for a suit or are CC types who are willing to share (even if they didn't intend to share quite so extensively as is happening).

Twitter doesn't seem to be doing much about scrapers in general. I have trouble sometimes tracking a tweet back to its original author.
Folks, pay attention. You've had a lot of complaints about this account (@haikutwaiku). A lot of the "contributing authors" have blocked the account. You say you are working on the broader issue of spam accounts. You kill off other accounts (including ones I actually DO want to read!). Then you need to deal with this, the right way, in a timely fashion. Please. We poets and haiku writers tend to be basically nice folks, generally speaking. Someone else who gets scraped might not be so patient, and when that happens you will have left yourself wide open for a lawsuit by contributing to the problem when it is reported.

When @haikutwaiku first appeared on Twitter I followed them. Then I saw what they were doing with stealing people's tweets and making it appear that they come from them. Stealing MY tweets.

I sent @messages to them asking to stop. No response. I sent messages to Twitter support staff asking questions about it. I unfollowed them. That did not help. I asked more questions. I was told to block them. I think they were the first account I actually really blocked.

I thought that worked, but it didn't - instead of scraping from my account, they scraped from twemes. I tried to block them on twemes, but it only blocks them from results in my searches, not for anyone else.

I asked repeatedly for the @haikutwaiku spambot to be one of the many accounts Twitter blocks and deletes. I find it incredibly ironic and shameful that Twitter deletes as spam accounts of good decent folk, and then refuses to block an account like this, when so many of the haiku authors have begged for it.

Does Twitter realize that according to copyright law, if we authors allow the scraping to continue without objecting to it, that places our poems, our haiku, our creative content in the public domain without recourse to copyright law or protection? If we want to do that and choose to do that, that would be one thing, but to have loss of authorship rights and intellectual property rights FORCED on us because of Twitter's inability to respond to complaints about the account is likely to eventually result in a two-pronged suit -- 1) against the thief, and 2) against Twitter for facilitating and supporting the theft. Right now Twitter is just lucky that the people who have been victimized by this either don't have the money for a suit or are CC types who are willing to share (even if they didn't intend to share quite so extensively as is happening).

Twitter doesn't seem to be doing much about scrapers in general. I have trouble sometimes tracking a tweet back to its original author.
Folks, pay attention. You've had a lot of complaints about this account (@haikutwaiku). A lot of the "contributing authors" have blocked the account. You say you are working on the broader issue of spam accounts. You kill off other accounts (including ones I actually DO want to read!). Then you need to deal with this, the right way, in a timely fashion. Please. We poets and haiku writers tend to be basically nice folks, generally speaking. Someone else who gets scraped might not be so patient, and when that happens you will have left yourself wide open for a lawsuit by contributing to the problem when it is reported.

When @haikutwaiku first appeared on Twitter I followed them. Then I saw what they were doing with stealing people's tweets and making it appear that they come from them. Stealing MY tweets.

I sent @messages to them asking to stop. No response. I sent messages to Twitter support staff asking questions about it. I unfollowed them. That did not help. I asked more questions. I was told to block them. I think they were the first account I actually really blocked.

I thought that worked, but it didn't - instead of scraping from my account, they scraped from twemes. I tried to block them on twemes, but it only blocks them from results in my searches, not for anyone else.

I asked repeatedly for the @haikutwaiku spambot to be one of the many accounts Twitter blocks and deletes. I find it incredibly ironic and shameful that Twitter deletes as spam accounts of good decent folk, and then refuses to block an account like this, when so many of the haiku authors have begged for it.

Does Twitter realize that according to copyright law, if we authors allow the scraping to continue without objecting to it, that places our poems, our haiku, our creative content in the public domain without recourse to copyright law or protection? If we want to do that and choose to do that, that would be one thing, but to have loss of authorship rights and intellectual property rights FORCED on us because of Twitter's inability to respond to complaints about the account is likely to eventually result in a two-pronged suit -- 1) against the thief, and 2) against Twitter for facilitating and supporting the theft. Right now Twitter is just lucky that the people who have been victimized by this either don't have the money for a suit or are CC types who are willing to share (even if they didn't intend to share quite so extensively as is happening).

Twitter doesn't seem to be doing much about scrapers in general. I have trouble sometimes tracking a tweet back to its original author.
Folks, pay attention. You've had a lot of complaints about this account (@haikutwaiku). A lot of the "contributing authors" have blocked the account. You say you are working on the broader issue of spam accounts. You kill off other accounts (including ones I actually DO want to read!). Then you need to deal with this, the right way, in a timely fashion. Please. We poets and haiku writers tend to be basically nice folks, generally speaking. Someone else who gets scraped might not be so patient, and when that happens you will have left yourself wide open for a lawsuit by contributing to the problem when it is reported.

Richard, there were problems with Twitter's spam filter and human review. Some users were mistaken as spammers, unfortunately including many of the more active Twitter advocates. – pfanderson, on October 06, 2008 10:19

Thank goodness Crystal chimed in! I tweeted @goldman about this about a week ago. Was baffled to see no response, and hoped that meant it was fixed. -- Oh, now I see - Goldman was moving. I bet he was too busy to check. Kelly, what was your original twitter account? – pfanderson, on September 03, 2008 23:53

If your twitter account has been deleted, please post the question on the page I mentioned above.

http://getsatisfaction.com/twitter/to...

Jason, several of us here have asked repeatedly about having this issue posted to the Twitter status page or Twitter blog as ways to help people who have experienced this find the right path to help and to understand that it isn't just them.

So far most of the people who have found this page are fairly high-end Twitter users, savvy folk who know their way around troubleshooting. I am concerned that there may be effected users who are not so savvy, may not know how to get help, may not realize the scope of the problem, or may not have even thought to check their accounts yet. It would be nice if Twitter looked out for any other as-yet-undiscovered victims of this problem and took a proactive role in communicating with their community, creating a variety of communication paths to the necessary support information. – pfanderson, on August 06, 2008 13:22

I think a number of us who experienced this are in the same situation, Damani. I am also supposed to be presenting Twitter, and am brainstorming safer ways to approach the whole microblogging concept rather than putting all your eggs in one basket. Frankly, last Friday morning, that would not have entered my mind, but it is probably a good thing. It is basically good practice in computing to have a variety of failsafes and backup plans, which in social media includes casting your net widely.

Meanwhile, stay in touch here! Jason has been really good about tracking this page and responding within a few hours usually to comments here. – pfanderson, on August 06, 2008 13:22

Hey! Looks good! :) – pfanderson, on August 06, 2008 02:46

I've also lost access to @theberrygirl – pfanderson, on August 05, 2008 16:16

Jason, there is one more thing I just am not getting. When I was trying to restore my following/followers, I unfollowed @LouiZoot to refollow. I have not been able to refollow. His stream is not locked, but clicking follow does nothing. I even restarted the browser, and still nothing. Help?

Me, too. Hadn't tried, so just discovered this. I am getting API error messages, and it keeps asking me to log in, over and over again. – pfanderson, on August 05, 2008 00:43