Check out this interesting answer on Yedda
>
Is it ethical to follow people on TWITTER that don't want to be followed?yes I do believe it is ethical to surveilance blockers of Twitter. I wasn't asking what I felt. I'm asking what you feel. I wrote the question like the way someone on TWITTER would write.
If you understand bocking then obviously you do too! Yes you are welcome to make your tweets private, but you can't stop people from creating new accounts to watch you. I follow a lot of people I disagree with. I am on TWITTER to learn and my primary reason for being there is for information. Some people go to TWITTER thinking it is the next MySpace, but there are no friends there. As a result I can follow you better as an unknown then as a person you hate. I feel this is the architecture of TWITTER. I like it... and I am going to use it as such.
I am now on my 22nd account.
The more the beeee---aaacches BLOCK... the more accounts I will have
;-P
Topics: internet, social, ethical relativism, ethical review, ethical, web 2.0, blogging, social networking, twitter
Answered by SimonStudio on May 10, 2008
View the entire discussion on Yedda
favorite comment by a believer in the system...
"Yes, of course it's ethical to follow people who block you. That's because the people doing the blocking the most are often top-level influencers like @davewinder or @techcrunch or
@stevegillmor who want to aggregate and filter and analyze information abut without any ideas critical of their role, their media, or them. And that's just plain wrong.
You can't have an open system and an open society with that sort of blockage.
It's not about private end-user blockage of this or that person who might stalk or annoy them; the problem is the arrogant abusiveness of people in the top 100 or the A-list. they're a severe problem to a developing media like this because they're friends with the devs and will nerf and bork it to suit themselves.
I have no idea if retweeting and invading feeds and such becomes a problem because frankly, I only skim feeds rather than becoming reliant them. Feeds are becoming cumbersome and passe. FriendFeed postable aggregators are becoming more usable.
I think if you don't like someone's voice inside your personal following feed, you just don't follow them, full stop. If you don't want someone to read you in real time in a stream, block them.
But as for vanity feeds trying to pick up even a mention of a name, hey, you get the wheat and the chaff if you are that obsessed with your self-image, and believe you are God's gift to social media for being a meta-analyzer.
If Twitter restricts itself to serve these new media czars who are more controlling than old media, new Twitter like things will appear around them."
Prokofy Neva
http://twitter.com/prokofy
