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Social Media Censorship

You're No Longer Allowed to Write What You Think

Written by Jonasz Tolopilo / 07 Jun 2010

Israel's attack on ships approaching Gaza made a huge impact on social media. Posting something about it on any of your virtual profiles just makes you feel so clever, serious, trendy, doesn't it? You may even count that someone from a huge news desk will type “flotilla” into search and your status will draw his attention. Yep, that might be a great way of getting a job as a newsreporter. However, if you're Twitter-oriented, you will be disappointed: they are suspected to have been censoring posts about the flotilla.

Everything started when the topic started trending upwards. As more and more people tagged their comments as #flotilla, at some point, when you searched for this tag, you briefly got 'Twitter error'. Seems like Twitter doesn't want to get too political. However, some have claimed that this was simply an anti-spam filter error. Maybe it was. But why the hell does it occur when controversial issues are being discussed?

Generally speaking, censorship in social media and on the Internet as a whole prove to be an unsolved issue. We can all agree that content which is obscene and filled with vulgarity should be banned. On the other hand, when guys from up in corporate headquarters start to decide what's being published, they might want to ban the content which is simply uncomfortable for them. There is one guy (http://ariwriter.com/proof-that-facebook-is-censoring-you/) who believes that facebook censors his status when he uses phrases such as 'facebook sucks' and 'twitter is great'. Basically, that every facebook user has a personal censor who reads his statuses. Sure, and their secret base is on Mars!

Obviously, there're some countries, like China where Google or Youtube cannot be used. Imagine how would you search for anything without Google and how would you watch indie music videos without Youtube. It's no surprise that they've got such a huge population when they can't waste their time in front of their computer. So maybe, this whole censoring thing is not as bad as it seems?