While the U.S. Constitution clearly did not take into consideration any tweets by our founding fathers, it is probably safe to assume that Samuel Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson would have loved to tweet their opinions as much as they loved to write for the newspapers of their day (sometimes under anonymous pseudonyms similar to today’s twitter user names). Those men, and countless soldiers in service to this nation, have risked their lives for our right to tweet or to post an article on Facebook; but that is not the same as arguing that those public tweets are protected. The Constitution gives you the right to post, but as numerous people have learned, there are still consequences for your public posts. What you give to the public belongs to the public. What you keep to yourself belongs only to you.
Claude Almansi on 27 Sep 09But what you rapidly find is that you're taken by the scruff of the internet over to Twitter where you're, um, encouraged to authorise the game to access your Twitter feed. (It uses the OAuth system, which means that the people behind playmobsterworld don't get your username or password. The owners have chosen to hide their identities by using Domainsbyproxy, and haven't left an email address on their website, so we don't know who they are, and couldn't contact them.) Once you've done that, the "game" will then spew that invitation in the form of a direct message to everyone it can. (The people who receive it are the ones who follow you, and who you also follow. They're the only group you can direct message on Twitter.) And so those DMs turn up in peoples' feeds, and they click them.. and so on. You'd think that by now Mobster World would be played by everyone. Not so. Instead many people - the non-players - get annoyed by it.
