Twitter Squatting?

I’ll get on the subject of domain squatting in later posts (as well as my promised writing about Tony Blair at the CCGA.  I know, I’ve been slacking).  But, humor me for a moment and allow me to discuss Twitter.

Let me direct your attention here, where Patton Oswalt’s name is being squatted on Twitter by some enterprising individual who also owns the Gmail address “twittmeanoffer@gmail.com”

Aside from the topic of squatting in general, some sort of discussion needs to take place on celebrity names (and names, in general) being squatted on Twitter.  I’d be remiss not to mention the hostile takeover the Obama campaign waged on a guy who was running a MySpace account under Obama’s name, unsolicited.  In this case, MySpace basically buckled and stripped the user of their account, giving it over to the Obama campaign.  This was an independent act taken by MySpace, and I’m a little unsure of the legal grounds surrounding it (if there are any at all).

So let’s use that to inform our discussion going forward, because the question really posed is whether or not Twitter will start doing the same.  So far, the answer seems to be “no”.  Shaq had to register under The_Real_Shaq due to his account name already being taken, though the person who grabbed it certainly is nothing like the aforementionied Oswalt squatter.  The ShamWow guy’s name is also taken on Twitter.

Neither of these fake accounts post malicious or character damaging material; they’re actually pretty funny to follow.

But what happens when people start grabbing names for the sole purpose of trying to sell them?  We can agree, at least, that this is wrong on some sort of principled grounds.  Doing some quick searches around the net, Oswalt’s account seems to be the only one blatantly being squatted.  I’m sure there are others, though.

And so we come to the key question: at what point can Twitter, and other social platforms, step in and strip a user of a name they created in likeness to a celebrity?  And, again, my mind wanders to malicious content.  At some point, Twitter will end up dealing with a user who’s not only pretending to be a celebrity, but doing it in such a way as to be convincing enough, and damaging enough, to warrant some sort of intervention.

We’re not there yet.

So what to do about account squatting?  Probably nothing.  While it’s reprehensible, it’s also not character damaging.  But the time will come when someone crosses the threshold of what’s acceptable impersonation and wanders into the realm of account revocation.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 25th, 2009 at 12:55 am and is filed under Computers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.