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.
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Hi Richard, you might find this post at P2P today interesting too:
http://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.
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