05/02/2020 2016 ONCJ 35 (CanLII) | CanLII A locked or private account is one that only those whom the account holder approves can follow. To favour a tweet is to indicate a positive response to a received tweet. To unfollow, by clicking on the “unfollow” button, is the reverse of “follow”. According to P.C. Dayler, if you unfollow someone then you cease to receive their tweets, but you will still see tweets from others you follow that reference the person. To retweet, seen as “RT” on the screen of the tweet, is to share a message with one’s own followers without changing it. To signal boost is to widely diffuse a tweet by retweeting. To modify a tweet, seen as “MT”, is to fix grammatical or spelling errors but not change the content of a tweet. One can also modify a tweet by commenting on it or adding information. Hashtag, the number sign (#) followed by text, usually identifies a topic. Anyone can create one; once it is created, anyone can follow the hashtag and receive all tweets that use it, from anyone, anywhere, regardless of who they are writing to. (It did not clearly emerge if this applies to direct messages.) Twitter rules are rules published by Twitter. One must agree to them in order to obtain an account. They address what is allowed in modifying tweets and what Twitter considers to be abuse. A feed or newsfeed enables a user to create specific feeds or lists that only give information that the user wants to follow, such as a type of tweet, or tweets from certain media outlets, or hashtags, according to P.C. Dayler. Ms. Reilly used feed to mean the activity on her account. A troll is an individual or a group that constantly causes problems by making negative comments and engaging in online bullying. A concern troll is someone who pretends to be sympathetic about a topic or discussion while trolling. Calling out is singling out someone for what they are doing or are, or directly confronting a user. To storify is to create a record of tweets or other communications. Avatar: an image chosen by an account holder that shows on every tweet they send. It can be a photograph or a cartoon, or the space for it can be left blank Open account: one that isn’t blocked. Anyone, even a person without a Twitter account, can see the tweets in an open account on the Twitter website. To tag (defined by Ms. Guthrie) is to use someone’s handle; she compared it to copying someone on an email. To subtweet is to refer to another tweet in text without quoting or retweeting the original tweet. Block: to set your account so that someone cannot send you tweets. A period (.) before a handle was the subject of conflicting views. P.C. Dayler treated the period as any other character put before a handle. “Putting any character before [a handle that starts a tweet], whether it’s a word, whether it’s a period, whether it’s anything like that … [means] that message is viewable by only people necessarily who follow the creator of that content.” So his view is that putting a period before a handle reduces diffusion of the tweet. Ms. Guthrie and Ms. Reilly distinguished the period from other text. Ms. Guthrie explained, according to the transcript, “If you start a tweet with a person’s handle, only people [who] follow both you and that user can see the tweet. If you add a period in front … everyone who follows you can see the tweet in their stream whether or not they follow the person you’re tweeting at.” Ms. Reilly said, “The use of a period before a user name is so that people who don’t follow Greg Elliott or don’t follow myself [and]* Greg Elliott would see that I directed a statement at him. Without that period, the only person that would have seen that statement would be Greg_A_Elliott, as well as anybody who happened to follow both my account and that account. … when you put the period though … the entire world” can see it. She added, “There is no limitation to it being able to be viewed. Anyone who has a Twitter account, or anyone who … would have logged on to @LadySnarksAlot would have seen that in my public display.”   * transcribed as “at”   FRAMEWORK file:///Users/nerissa/Downloads/Columbia CSV/R v Gregory Allan Elliott.htm 4/43