Twitter has a Trend list that is supposed to show the ten most frequent topics being tweeted.
Right now, (10:40am), Vince Cable is in 7th spot, on account of his tardy tax payments.
#OccupyOakland is a very busy hashtag, on account of the cowards in the Oakland Police attacking non-violent demonstrators with tear gas and rubber bullets.
I set up two tag pages alongside each other, both on Twitter, and set one going to collect #OccupyOakland tweets, and another to collect Vince Cable tweets.
Right now, ten minutes later, the #OccupyOakland tweets come in at 159, and Vince has 92 tweets.
Yet Vince is on the Twitter trending list, and #OccupyOakland is not.
I have run this test before with the same results: politically sensitive topics do not make it to the Twitter trend lists.
The question is, who censors Twitter? Is this a voluntary self-censorship, or does some Government agency visit them at their offices and sit on their desks?
Whatever the explanation, it stinks.
Hi Richard, you might find this post at P2P today interesting too:
ReplyDeletehttp://blog.p2pfoundation.net/major-search-engines-tools-of-censorship-2/2011/10/27
There's a lot more going on than meets the eye, of course.