Tag Archive for 'censorship'

Twitter and Facebook have not abandoned Wikileaks, yet.

Published on December 8, 2010 in Facebook, Twitter, politics and social media. View Comments

Amazon Web Services, PayPal, Visa, Mastercard, its DNS server and its Swiss bank account have all abandoned Wikileaks, presumably after Senator Joe Lieberman called on corporations to stop doing business with Wikileaks. However, two notable outlets for the organisation’s communications still appear to be accessible as I write this post: Facebook and Twitter.

Facebook Wikileaks

Are Twitter and Facebook going to shut down the Wikileaks accounts? It appears not, well at least not yet. ReadWriteWeb reported that Facebook has made the decision to keep Wikileaks’ Facebook page live. Andrew Noyes, Facebook’s Manager of Public Policy Communications is quoted as saying:

The Wikileaks Facebook Page does not violate our content standards nor have we encountered any material posted on the page that violates our policies.

Facebook also asserted that it hasn’t received any official requests to disable the Wikileaks page (as of the writing of that post), or any notification that the articles posted on the page contain any unlawful content. They also maintain that they are continuing to monitor the situation. This seems to imply that if Wikileaks is found to be breaking the law, Facebook might change its mind.

Wikileaks Twitter

Twitter has also said that it is not censoring Wikileaks from ‘Trending Topics’, after it was questioned by reporters and users on the issue. Twitter was suspected of removing the hashtags #wikileaks and #cablegate after the heavily used tags were no longer trending.

So despite taking a number of serious hits over the past couple of days, including the arrest of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange in London on sexual assault charges, Wikileaks is still able to communicate via social media.

Additionally, to make it very difficult indeed to remove Wikileaks from the Internet, with the aid of many supporters, multiple (1289 at the time of writing) mirrors of Wikileaks have been set up.

Do you think Wikileaks’ social media accounts will eventually be disabled, if it’s found that any laws have been broken by the organisation?

The Politics Of Censoring The Web

Published on June 4, 2009 in Twitter, politics, social media and technology. View Comments

Apparently, Twitter and many other social networks were blocked in China in the lead-up to the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. According to Mashable, the networks included Twitter, YouTube, WordPress, Flickr and others. Also included were local sites such as Fanfou, Xiaonei and Wordku, although these said they were closed for maintenance.

The blocking of these networks must have been frustrating for a lot of people, to say the least! I can only imagine the uproar that would occur if the government tried to block or filter the internet in Australia.

Oh, hold on a second, there has been a debate going on in this country about the government introducing a contentious plan to force internet service providers to filter the internet to a certain (or rather uncertain) extent. Talk of this kind of censorship raises quite a few questions. How is it decided what gets censored and what doesn’t? Who decides? Where do you draw the line in a medium that is constantly being updated and changed? Is any system for censoring the internet workable in practice? Is it healthy for a democracy to begin censoring the internet at all?

The plan by the Australian government to filter the internet is one thing,  blocking whole social networks for days at a time for political reasons is quite another.