Freedom of Speech (Freedom to Tweet)

In this blog entry I will try to combine some of my major subjects in my thesis, because it reflects what I experience on Twitter, it is about to follow or being followed and it is about what can be written on Twitter and what cannot be written, so language is important too. And I need to mention some applications that play a role in this context too. I do have some experience with following people and at the moment I follow more than a hundred users, but most of them do not tweet that much. I am being followed by more than 170 users but this number changes every day, some users join me and others stop following me. There is not much growth in this number of followers.

Every friday a lot of users start following other users and use the hastag #followfriday but then on monday some users like @avmaster delete those users from their friendslist with the help of friendsorfollow.com. This website shows users who are being followed but do not care to follow back. On Twitter there is a lot of one-way traffic going on, and in contrast to blogs it can be made visible who reads who. The tweet from @avmaster that triggered my attention is;

@artgrrl I follow everybody who follows me…..And who don’t follow back, I trash on monday….. 6:59 PM May 25th from web in reply to artgrrl

When I check my username @artgrrl on this website I discovered 32 users who I follow who do not follow me back, and some of them I though they did follow me back;

I was surprised how easily I can be deceived. I was in doubt wether to unfollow them or try to make them follow me, I have not decided what to do. Then agaian, 102 users follow me and I do not follow them back. When I checked @twesis I found 410 users which I deleted using a script through Greasemonkey, a Firefox plug-in. Lucky for me I did not have to remove more than 400 users by hand and some users I kept following anyway. Most of these users are from the period I had an auto-follow installed which did not automatically unfollow users.

Besided the freedom of who you can follow there is a freedom of speech, the freedom to tweet what you want. Although not all users will like what you have to say and might stop following or even block you. Some tweets can be discriminating while others are just annoying. One user I follow (@JacoKoster) does not like it when users use words that start with tw;

JacoKoster@artgrrl Gaat heen met je twoissants 10:42 AM May 26th from web in reply to artgrrl

On one hand I think it is pretty funny when users start words with tw, especially meetings, but after a while it can be really annoying. But this is an innocent example. What if I become too personal, like I sometimes did. In an article in the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant @2525 argues that you have to be careful what to tweet considering the example of Cisco, and that you cannot tweet everything that comes up in your mind, like in real life, but I strongly disagree.[1] There is athing called freedom of speech. Back in the nineties I was a proud member of the Blue Ribbon Campain and thought people should be able to expres themselves online, as in regular life they could not always do so, in some countries people can not even blog what they want, let alone say things out loud in the streets.

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[1] De Volkskrant, 23 mei 2009