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Be Careful What You Tweet For

I truly believe that their is a beautiful and useful side to Twitter. I use it my classroom to keep my students updated on their homework and people can use the service to get themselves out of prison.

But, of course there are those who do not use Twitter wisely and get themselves in trouble. There is the infamous story of the person who got a job offer from Cisco and tweeted about it and, seemed to lose the job. It went down like this:

Even after this, you still see an amazing number of people post negative comments about their work place and other situations on Twitter. I think part of the problem is that people don’t realize how big Twitter is becoming and they don’t realize how public Twitter can be if their profiles are not set to private.

Well, now we are getting to a point where people are being sued over their tweets. I guess this was inevitable, but we entering into a new dimension of the Web 2.0 world. Here is the summary of the story:

Now, we know that Horizon is a “sue first, ask questions later kind of organization,” so I don’t want to get in trouble with this post. (Although this philosophy makes me think the tenant probably was in the right here.) But rather I’d like to talk about the idea of being sued on the internet.

Since this company filed a suit, I looked up what exactly what libel is to see if this was justified:

So, technically it seems this lawsuit would fall under this category. One aspect I am unsure of is if a company can file a libel suit. The FAQ above mentions when a person is wronged, but maybe it can go either way. In this case, the comment was made about a company. But, in this case the statement was definitely made to more than one person and it was clear who the comment was about. The question I guess would come down to whether or not there was mold in her apartment and if Horizon did anything about it. (Was the statement false or not?)

I think what blows my mind is the mindset of the management company here. Now, this tweet happened on May 12th, and the lawsuit happens two and a half months later. That seems odd. Why bring it up now?

Next, this news story, and their law suit is doing more damage, in my mind, to their company’s name than that tweet, that I never saw, ever did. I got the impression from the story that Horizon doesn’t even really care or want to address if there was mold in the apartment or not. Maybe this tweet was necessary and accurate.

John Willams of WGN-AM radio 720 in Chicago, one of my favorites, interviewed a law professor, Jim Sparta, about this today and you can listen to that interview on-line:

John and Jim discussed how the internet is treated in terms of libel and free speech and covered some of the issues surrounding this topic.

Next, let’s contrast this situation with a similar event involving United Airlines. United broke a man’s $3,500 guitar while he was flying from Halifax to somewhere else (sorry I don’t remember where.) He saw them breaking it as it was being loaded onto the plane and after the flight he tried for some time to follow United’s procedure for handling damaged luggage and was eventually told, we aren’t going to help you. So, he wrote a song about his trials, posted it on YouTube, and now United is going to use his song for future customer service training. (Video posted below.) (You can hear the guitarist, Dave Carroll, interviewed with John Williams of WGN-720.)

Now, if the tweet about the mold was indeed false and was intended to cause damage, I suppose I can understand the lawsuit, but I worry about the precedent it could set on the internet, in which people will be scared to post this kind of story. One of the amazing powers the internet gives us is an uncensored voice through which we can share this kind of story to help other people out. Just today woot.com was offering the Oral-B Vitality toothbrush for sale and I thought about buying it to replace our Crest Spinbrushes. I did a Google search and found a review that changed my opinion.

Now, if beckytcy‘s review couldn’t have been posted because she was afraid of being sued by Oral-B, I would have bought a brush that would have been inferior to the one I currently own. I can see why companies are afraid of this open dialog, but hopefully most will handle it as United did. I like to think that blogs will be protected under some sort of 1st ammendment freedom of speech as newspapers are. As long as people are responsible, then the speech should be protected.

Personally I try to keep my Tweets on the positive side because I know they are public and I don’t know who will see them. This is especially true of any tweets I send about work, because I do not really care to be fired if I post about my students being royal pains one day. (Not that they ever are, that is totally hypothetical.)

Only time will tell, how this sort of suit will be handled, and I for one will be anxiously watching its resolution in the courts. Hopefully as people use the internet and social networking as their consumer advocates, they will be mindful of what they are posting and be factual in their statements and not ruin this outlet for the rest of us. Further, I hope that companies will take the path that United has taken and uses these sorts of incidents to improve their image, and not make is worse.

To me, even if Horizon gets it $50,000, it has done more damage to its name than before. If this tweet had become news, they could have just addressed the issue, if they were in the right they could have just said this girl is wrong and moved on. Now, their name is going to be dragged through the media, and I don’t think in a positive way.

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Tags: Freedom of Speech, Horizon Group Management, Internet, libel, twitter, United Airlines, Web 2.0, wgn radio, YouTube