If -- as some have suggested -- Twitter is trying to cut down on free speech with its new censorship policies that were announced last week, then it's not doing a particularly good job.
Twitter CEO Dick Costolo sought to calm the global outrage over the company’s new country-by-country censorship policy on Monday, complaining in part that the issue is being treated with the same kind of shorthand that has made Twitter popular.
Twitter has refined its technology so it can censor messages on a country-by-country basis. The additional flexibility announced Thursday is likely to raise fears that Twitter’s commitment to free speech may be weakening as the short-messaging company expands into new countries in an attempt to broaden its audience and make more money.
Google’s dropped its logo-shroud, Wikipedia’s returned from limbo, normal service in general has been resumed and all’s right with the world…except that SOPA and PIPA are still looming on Capitol Hill. So did yesterday’s blackout protests against these bills have an actual impact?
So it’s lights out for Wikipedia, a blacked-over logo for Google, Reddit closing up for 12 hours and thousands of others shuttering for a day to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) — what can you do if you don’t have a website that gets a bazillion hits a day?
When Congress gaveled for the year in December, opponents of two Internet-censoring piracy bills cheered. Their efforts seemed to have blocked the legislation’s movement. But when Congress comes back later this month, it already has a first order of business: regulate the net.
With Mark Zuckerberg spending Christmas in Vietnam, the opportunity for some snark about the Facebook founder’s apparently ironic choice of destination was not lost. The U.K.’s Daily Mail promptly proclaimed: “Status update: Mark Zuckerberg goes for a buffalo ride with his girlfriend in Vietnam…where his Facebook site is banned.”
There’s little to make you feel as out of touch with what’s happening with “the kids today” as discovering that there are all manner of words that apparently have double meanings that you were entirely unaware of. For example, “Kmart.” Or “hobo.” Or “murder.” All of which were contained on a list of obscene words that the Pakistani Telecommunication Authority recently attempted to have banned from text messaging within the country.
While Congress mulls an Internet blacklist, there are efforts underway to reengineer parts of the Net to make communications more decentralized and censorship-proof.
Chinese microblogging site Sina Weibo—said to resemble the lovechild of Facebook and Twitter—is reportedly filtering out search results containing the word “occupy” when paired with the names of various places.
Good news for rioters and social networking ne’er-do-wells (and, those groups notwithstanding, anti-censorship folk in general): Facebook and Twitter won’t knuckle under to calls they be shut down when citizens get unruly—as England’s citizenry did just a few weeks ago in London and several other British cities.
