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Is Twitter Censoring Wikileaks Trends?
comforteagle writes "There are suspicions coming to the surface this morning that Twitter may be censoring WikiLeaks-related tweets from forming a trending topic. Why is still unclear at this point, as during Iranian protests a short while ago Twitter appeared to be in the fray of helping to spread the word. As of this morning it appears that Twitter may have some explaining to do. One of Twitter's engineers has chimed in over the weekend, but some aren't convinced."
Maybe the type of persons which like to tweet, are short attention spanned twit which are not interested in complex long running news like wiki leaks, but on what DJ hammer took on breakfast. Thus it not appearing in the trends, as the person concerned with it are a minority. I have only anecdotal evidence for it, but I work in IT, with a high percentage of nerd, and all looked at me with big eye when I mentioned wiki leaks last week, and today they just shrugged. The average sheep DO NOT CARE.
I am amazed at how many fronts have been opened against wikileaks in the past few weeks. Clearly, there are people who want it crushed, but I can't recall ever seeing the number and variety of attacks against another "thorn in the side" as we're seeing against wikileaks.
The takeaway lesson: those who try to learn the truth and spread the truth will be destroyed.
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
Good observation. This tempest sounds like a few people, with enough connections to news people, are convinced that the rest of the world *must* be as interested in this topic as they are. With that as their premise, they conclude Twitter is 'cheating.'
Home of The Suki Series
Why is it that for some, every time something negative happens for Wikileaks, there must be a conspiracy that is behind it.
1. When the first accusations were leverage against Assange for rape; many were screaming that the CIA was behind it.
2. When Amazon stop hosting Wikileaks, the government MUST HAVE been behind it.
3. When Paypal froze Wikileak's account, more government pressure.
And now this. Could it have occurred to those people that the US government isn't behind every one of those things?
Yeah, there is nothing newsworthy about the kidnappings, torture, deaths, coverups and treaty violations found in the latest release. No one cares about those things, they're just being drama queens.
Links to the things mentioned above can be found on this post:
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1896026&cid=34443616
This sentence no verb.
If its so , blehhh.... then why are major leaders and govt people so upset and angry!?
Maybe if americans got of their ass, and looked at NONE usa websites, like UK ones they might learn something apart from
the lies that DoD corporates dish out (aka GE/NBC & friends)
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
The cable leaks have almost no worthy information. They don't show cover-ups, torture or anything else we didn't already know about. It's the equivalent on getting caught passing a note at primary school.
The Yanks have little to worry about.
Posts like yours are somewhat frustrating because it fuels other paranoid people into believing that conspiracy is everywhere, when in fact, its nothing but self delusion fueled by others of a like-minded delusion. Much like moon landing conspiracies, there is absolutely no reason to give them anything other than a cursory glance.
You're suggesting that Google and Twitter are part of a massive conspiracy to hide a leak of material which largely, everyone who reads, already knows. Obviously, there are some exceptions, but those exceptions largely only serve to fill in detail and cause governmental chaos. Furthermore, you are suggesting that twitter is purposely censoring while Google is not only censoring but reformulating statistical modules to not only up hold the conspiracy, but but to ensure the results match that of twitter.
Which is more likely? People are just not that interested in reading about fairly well known information, which they are already not interested in reading day to day? Or that there is some massive conspiracy involving all of the world's governments and companies, both large and small?
Exactly. If these feelings persist in other facets of your life, medication might be worth reviewing with your doctors.
just like they were so nice to Bush,
You know I have trouble telling if you are being sarcastic, or if you truly believe that, but you appear to actualy believe that the mainstream press was nice to Bush. The press continuously played up every accusation against Bush. The mainstream press was talking about how bad the economy was when unemployment was 4.8%. Now that unemployment is 9.8%, they are constantly talking about how the economy is doing wonderful, it's just those "unexpectedly" high unemployment numbers that we need to worry about.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
No, it's just that all you WikiLeaks fanboys refuse to acknowledge the true popularity of #mycatissooocute and #whatihadforbreakfast
This tempest sounds like a few people, with enough connections to news people, are convinced that the rest of the world *must* be as interested in this topic as they are. With that as their premise, they conclude Twitter is 'cheating.'
Wishful thinking that people would be more interested in international corruption than, say, the european music awards.
And if you bother to read the comments posted to the link you provided, not to mention twitter's own response, you'll easily see the only story here is that people are delusional in falsely believing that twitter is censoring anything. Its a fact which google's statistics as well as the sites which the linked article even validate.
So really the only story here is that people are going out of their way to create a story about the fact there isn't a story to be created. So in short of that, the new story is one of conspiracy which never existed in the first place while trying to hide the fact there never was a story.
Actually I did. And I did not find ANY reliable and trustworthy link between the two. Between somebody who makes grandiose claims and somebody who asks some proof of the claims, who is the bigger troll?
Computers can reverse entropy.
It would seem to me the burden of evidence rests with the person making the claim.
Eschew Obfuscation
Twitter's trends are based off growth, not volume. This conspiracy shit is getting ridiculous. If this keeps up we're going to log into slashdot and see a story titled: "Assange orders extra hot Skim Vente Pumpkin Spice Latte at Starbucks but given NON-SKIM MILK INSTEAD in Starbuck/Government conspiracy to SLOWLY KILL HIM!!!`1!"
The comparisons on the blog are flawed.
The main example is that of "Inception" which the author cries trended for an extended period. However the example is almost totally wrong.
[Inception] managed to trend essentially uninterrupted from August 8 to August 26. During this stretch, the popularity of the phrase generally fell except for a significant spike around August 17th. It seems strange that Twitter’s algorithm would identify something to be trending in the midst of the sustained fall.
However, the data in fact shows Inception Trending almost uninterrupted from July 13 into early August. By August 8th, when he thinks it is constant, it is becoming less and less regular and by the end of his "essentially uninterrupted" period it is trending less than 50% of the time. On August 26th it was only on the list for a half hour!
The author then points out that #wikileaks hasn't trended, giving the figures to show that it hasn't showed up since July and August. Then of course, he mentions that #cablegate has in fact been trending since then, but avoids mentioning the full details. Given that Twitter tries to consolidate similar tags it seems pretty reasonable that #cablegate was just selected either automatically or manually as the "face" of the leaks on twitter. It trended on the days when news was exploding and discussion was increasing, rather than decreasing (although the author doesn't say how long these trends lasted and given his total misreading of the previous figures it's easy to suspect that it actually trended longer). That's how it's meant to work.
Twitter, like Google, has been close to Obama. Wikileaks is making the Obama Administration (especially Hillary Clinton) look really bad both through the release of what was in those cables
Actually the Clinton state department comes off pretty well in those cables; professional, perceptive, and hard-working.