[Infowarrior] - Twitter Appears to Censor Wikileaks-Related Trends

[Richard Forno]

Though Twitter is not an instrument of democracy but a corporate service ... ergo I don't necessarily agree w/the latter part of that note ... but the pressure to filter anything to do with WL, if true, is interesting.  --- rick

Twitter Appears to Censor Wikileaks-Related Trends
posted by Eugenia Loli-Queru	 on Mon 6th Dec 2010 00:24 UTC

http://www.osnews.com/story/24100/Twitter_Appears_to_Censor_Wikileaks-Related_Trends

I'm (was?) a Twitter user. This past week I found it utterly weird that none of the words #wikileaks, #cablegate, #cables, #Assange were actually "trending". I even tweeted about this 5 days ago. Today, my fears of secret censorship are coming true. It appears that Twitter is censoring all these words, so they don't appear in the (much-used) Twitter "trends" list.

It has done so for a whole week, and continues to do so. The only related trend today that currently trends in a few countries is the much less popular #imwikileaks, which probably shows us that Twitter's filter engine simply hasn't added that keyword too in their filter, YET!

If Twitter was to delete Wikileaks' Twitter account based on some Terms of Service reasons (like Amazon did), I wouldn't like it, but I could swallow it. But witnessing Twitter [according to third party stats and common sense] censoring plain words, it shows me that what Twitter does is censoring the DEMOCRATIC NATURE of trends. THIS censorship is much more profoundly unacceptable, because they don't just block one account, one voice, but they censor & MANIPULATE the COLLECTIVE VOICE. Among those, my voice. At that point, censorship transcends Wikileaks, it even transcends that collective voice, and it becomes personal.

Now, I'd probably could give them the benefit of the doubt, but seeing how Twitter suspended their own scheduled server maintenance last year in order to not interrupt its users from tweeting on Iran's (failed) revolution, for me, this is a good indication about how ONE-SIDED, and POLITICAL, their motivations are in nature. I will say this: Twitter this week appears to have tried to manipulate public opinion by enabling/disabling the right bits each time, as it sees fit, and then serving the net result back to us, as something that traditionally was  considered "democratically popular". It's obviously not so. And who knows how many times they've already done this in the past.

Like Digg.com, Twitter became what it is today because it made its users believe that they're part of an internet force that embodied democracy on the way information is becoming popular. Therefore, Twitter has no excuse censoring trends, because it's like going against its own roots.