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posted by martyb on Saturday October 31 2015, @09:51PM   Printer-friendly
from the delayed-dissemination-deemed-despicable dept.

Over the past year as the communications service Twitter has rolled out new features with the stated goal of stopping "abusive tweets", critics have expressed concerns that this technology may be used for political censorship. These concerns received broader attention last week when Cryptome published a report by Paul Dietrich alleging that Twitter had hidden information about leaked NSA papers from American users.

As alleged by Dietrich, Twitter will hide information from users for the critical period of the first 24 hours, when users are most likely to spread the information, before allowing the information to be seen again. The disappearance and reappearance of the information resembles a software glitch. Dietrich describes this mechanism as "Censorship that doesn't look like censorship... Subtle, deniable, and quite ruthless."

Concerns about the system were first raised in April by Twitter user Daddy Warpig who reported that Twitter was hiding all posts by certain users of the conservative #TCOT and liberal #Gamergate hashtags along with users affiliated with the Sad Puppies campaign of science-fiction authors protesting against a perceived bias in the Hugo Awards.

Twitter introduced a revised system in May, stating that it would hide only "tweets sent directly to an individual which are from a recently registered account and use language similar to previously flagged messages." Lizzy Finnegan, a writer for the Escapist, discovered that Twitter was hiding messages from established users who had previously used the #Gamergate hashtag but was not blocking new accounts created to test the system by sending the exact same messages.

[More after the break.]

This is not the only time that Twitter has been accused of censorship. A report headlined by Rima Tamash of Rice University found that Twitter had censored 266,407 tweets of 7,642 Turkish users, with censored topics including politicians and the Aydin Dogan media group. In mid-July, Twitter deleted the accounts of several Japanese artists in response to a complaint from the Russian government that their works were pornographic. Earlier this year, Twitter suspended conservative commentator Janet Bloomfield and manmade-global-warming denier Steven Goddard for no apparent reason other than their beliefs.

Twitter has also been accused of targeting citizen journalists for reporting news that offends powerful interests. Vicki Pate of Re-Newsit was banned from Twitter after posting a satirical cartoon of attorney Benjamin Crump. Pate had written about the financial dealings of Black Lives Matter activist Shaun King, a business partner in the Upfront Foundation with Twitter director of innovation Claire Diaz-Oritz. RadioNewz was suspended from Twitter after reporting on Pate's suspension. In May, Twitter banned Chuck C. Johnson of GotNews for soliting donations "to taking out" Black Lives Matter protester Deray McKesson with a future expose.

Twitter banned minor Youtube celebrity LeoPirate shortly after LeoPirate reported on leaked internet chat logs revealing the past pedophilic tendencies of Nicholas Nyberg, the administrator of the video game music website FFShrine who currently writes for feminist websites under the pen name Sarah Butts. Twitter also banned the account of Encyclopedia Dramatica for reporting on the subject and briefly suspended former Washington Times assistant editor Robert Stacy McCain for linking to one of his own articles about it.

As previously mentioned on Soylent News, late last year Twitter suspended several accounts associated with opposition to the Atheism+ movement and the Gamergate scandal.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 31 2015, @11:13PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 31 2015, @11:13PM (#257026)

    Twitter is not a government. It's not even an ISP. You post your twatty bits on their system at their pleasure.

    Twitter really make people dumber, don't they.

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Saturday October 31 2015, @11:29PM

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Saturday October 31 2015, @11:29PM (#257031) Journal

    If nobody complains about corporate censorship, it will continue to happen.

    If Twitter pisses off enough users, it goes under. Advertisers may be the customers, but users still matter.

    --
    [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
    • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 31 2015, @11:58PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 31 2015, @11:58PM (#257037)

      Are you new? Nothing that pisses off users/people ever goes away. Sure, people bitch about corporate abuse and threaten to boycott/revolt/whatever but few follow through. Systemd, Facebook, Twitter, Xbox, Windows 10 forced-upgrades/telemetry/shenanigans, Google, Apple, unwarranted government surveillance, lying politicians, criminal cops, and round we go...

      • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 01 2015, @12:21AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 01 2015, @12:21AM (#257047)

        Since 2001, successfull boycotts have been considered "economic terrorism". You are allowed to complain as long as you are not effective in doing so.

        In Canada, Charities are barred from eliminating poverty [thejournal.ie]. In effect, they are limited to treating the symptoms of the problem, rather than the root causes. In it's reasoning the CRA essentially said that eliminating poverty is not a charitable goal because rich people also benefit.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 01 2015, @01:41AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 01 2015, @01:41AM (#257070)

          These days as more and more smaller businesses get replaced by a few big businesses and big businesses own most of the natural resources it's hard to boycott anything. To boycott one company leaves you with few alternatives and those alternatives often also deserve to get boycotted themselves.

      • (Score: 3, Insightful) by cmn32480 on Sunday November 01 2015, @04:15PM

        by cmn32480 (443) <reversethis-{moc.liamg} {ta} {08423nmc}> on Sunday November 01 2015, @04:15PM (#257178) Journal

        Slashdot?

        --
        "It's a dog eat dog world, and I'm wearing Milkbone underwear" - Norm Peterson
  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by cubancigar11 on Sunday November 01 2015, @05:32AM

    by cubancigar11 (330) on Sunday November 01 2015, @05:32AM (#257100) Homepage Journal

    Twitter is a political platform. There is a reason why so many influential people and journalists are on it. It is not because those influential people want the world to know what they ate on a lonely night. It is because it is sort of a research tool for journalists, who can see that #NewThing is trending and know that it is what people want.

    This puts twitter in a historically unprecedented spot of being a private entity which has huge influence on public opinion but is not a media company in itself. We are talking about a company that sells papyrus and has a say on what gets printed on it.

    People chanting 'private company' should keep in mind that new way of doing things bring new problems and old solutions sometimes are not sufficient. Twitter is already in a position to bring mass censorship and it being private company is not enough, because it is always the new voice that gets censored.

    And that is the problem with so called liberals. When they are in power they will come-up with all kinds of reasons to let censorship go but if the conservatives were in power this same behavior will looks like a despicable shameless tact.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 01 2015, @02:14PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 01 2015, @02:14PM (#257153)

      Twitter is a political platform.

      About as much as HBO.