Kirtsy, a ‘digg for chicks’ recently (and still does) have a problem with users submitting porn sites. Sunday, a Twitter account @kirtsynews created quite a stir after it posted some very sexual updates, not aligned with the brand or userbase. Users complained, and blamed twitter for letting ‘brand hijacking’ happen, demanding that the account be suspended. A fan of the site created the account, growing the following to over 4000 users.
The only problem? The links of the account were directly from the Kirtsy RSS feed, and linked to the articles on the site. The only thing the account was guilty of was being exactly what the site was, user submitted links. In this case, a few adult industry website owners posted links to their site, and the bot published them.
So Kirtsy removes the porn, problem solved, right? No, in this digital lynchmob culture, users chose to place the blame on Twitter. The weird thing? It worked. Twitter removed the account for unspecified reasons. The account now reads “Sorry, the account you were headed to has been suspended due to strange activity.”
Yes, republishing an RSS feed is strange.
Couple this with the recent pulling of usernames and you must ask, do you just need a good story and a handful of friends to fake outrage to have a username pulled from twitter? Or would Twitter having a policy and sticking to it work?
Hi Andrew,
Thanks for bringing this up again. I think I’d like to share something about this situation. Kirtsy knows that there is an issue with the ability for published articles of varying content (ie. porn) to easily make it into syndication. Fair enough. We will fix it somehow!
The re-syndication of the Kirtsy RSS feed by someone other than Kirtsy was the main issue this past weekend. Someone initially opened up @kirtsy before the women of Kirtsy could do so. Luckily, Gwen was able to secure it for the site’s use. Immediately afterward, @KirtsyNews pops up and starts re-syndicating the RSS feed again. So the name, logo, tagline, etc. was one again out there but not related to Kirtsy. It’s great if fan’s support the site but our attempts to contact the account owner failed numerous times. The problem comes when content (no matter what it is!) gets published into the channel and Kirtsy cannot address it within the same channel. The 4000 followers of KIrtsyNews thought they were party to an official communication mechanism of Kirtsy.com. They were not. You are confusing technical issues with brand issues.
So there are two issues. Kirtsy will get the content system fixed and Kirtsy will maintain control of their mark. :)
I sent you this link when it all happened, perhaps it’s worth another look now given your post: http://www.ecommercetimes.com/story/44364.html. It is illegal to resyndicate an RSS feed unless copyright is given. It least that’s my layperson’s interpretation.
We all love Twitter and no one to my knowledge blames them for anything. How could we?
Thanks for supporting Kirtsy and feel free to talk to me directly about any of this if you’d like.
James Mayes (husband of a Kirtsy Chick).
http://getsatisfaction.com/twitter/topics/kirtsy_has_porn_users_blame_twitter
Oops, too late: http://getsatisfaction.com/twitter/topics/shut_down_kirtsynews_for_brand_hijacking_porn
@James I would say it is fair use for someone to republish your rss feed on twitter, just like it is fair use for you to use the title and a link to a blog article. The followers of the account were expecting what they published, news as voted on by the community (the articles had over 20 votes for them respectively).
In the end the control of the account is solely based on what was on the site, which you have full control over.
A hiccup for the young startup, a huge precedent set by Twitter.
projections non tonne fossil