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Centralized Network Control of Twitter: Flawed

posted by martyb on Tuesday May 27 2014, @03:25AM   Printer-friendly
from the if-nobody-hears-it-was-it-said? dept.

kaszz writes:

Twitter made a public stance in 2011 to remain a platform for free speech, having helped fuel movements such as the Arab Spring. This past week, however, Twitter is shown to have complied with Russian government demands to block a pro-Ukrainian Twitter feed from reaching Russian citizens, with Turkish government demands that it remove content that the Turkish government wants removed, and with a Pakistani bureaucrat's request that content he considers blasphemous and unethical be censored in Pakistan. Given Twitter's role in the democratic uprisings of the past few years, perhaps these capitulations just show that centralized control of information is inherently flawed. Any network under the control of a few individuals may be compromised by non-technical means. Examples like I2P-Messenger may be a necessity.

 
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  • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday May 27 2014, @11:59AM

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday May 27 2014, @11:59AM (#47862) Journal

    If it wuld be sufficient that a distributed alternative exists, we would not have any issues by now: One of the earliest communication systems on the internet, Usenet, was distributed by nature. Yet people left it for more centralized systems.

    my 2 cents

    1. I personally learned not to care too much what others (or even the majority) think or does. As an example, only 5 years ago everybody except a few "knew" that house prices never go down
    2. the specific topic was "Twitter is bad because it is centralized". Now, an example of decentralized (even if not perfect) system that does messaging and does it reasonable well: IRC. Some may remember (if not, here's the link [wikipedia.org]): long before Arab spring, it was used to report on the 1991 Soviet coup d'etat attempt throughout a media blackout.
      My point? Twitter or not, centralized or distributed, if the population wants it bad enough there's little** the officials can do to stop spreading the info

    ** short of cutting the entire country from the Internet

    --
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
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