Laquon Treadwell Tweet about Team 134

It's pretty common to see the word stalking next to the word twitter anymore.  It's sad because there are real cases of stalking that it seems our legal system is unable to do anything about.

http://www.mediabistro.com/alltwitter/twitter-stalking-isnt-really-stalking-according-to-a-us-judge_b16957 

In short the article says -

"A man sent over 8,000 disturbing and threatening tweets to a Buddhist religious leader in a few short months, even going so far as to tell her to “go kill yourself”. But despite scaring her so much she refused to leave her house for 18 months, a judge has found this man innocent of stalking – siding with the freedom of speech advocates that Twitter is a public forum that can be disregarded by the victim."

This is worlds away from reading a post and reposting it to a blog, which is all that was done here.  Worlds away from stalking...

Another interesting discussion point in the article was the judge's ruling.  He ruled in that case that it wasn't stalking because it was public.  His reasoning was this -

“In his order, Judge Titus drew an analogy to the colonial period, when the Bill of Rights was written. A blog, he said, is like a bulletin board that a person of that time might have planted in his front yard. “If one colonist wants to see what is on another’s bulletin board, he would need to walk over to his neighbor’s yard and look at what is posted, or hire someone else to do so,” he offered.

With Twitter, he went on, news from one colonist’s bulletin board could automatically show up on another’s. The postings can be “turned on or off by the owners of the bulletin boards,” he wrote. In other words, one can disregard what is posted on a bulletin board. “This is in sharp contrast to a telephone call, letter or e-mail specifically addressed to and directed at another person,” he concluded.” 

Not exactly how I would look at Twitter, but it does kind of put a different perspective on the issue.