Slashdot Mirror
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."
For Wikileaks trending. You can see here that Wikileaks was hot on Friday, not Sunday. Google Trends (for Google searches, not Tweets) actually heavily corresponds to this. Further more, if you look at Google Trends, you'll note that the recent trending on Friday wasn't even half of what it peaked at during the Afghan war cable release. It might even be less than that edited journalist shooting video. After checking Google trends for Sunday, "wikileaks" wasn't in the top twenty. I'm checking other Twitter harvesting sites for trends and not seeing anything that would indicate that Sunday should have been a huge day for Wikileaks on Twitter.
By no means conclusive evidence one way or the other though.
My work here is dung.
I can't recall what it was, but Scienceblogs was atwitter with claims that Twitter was censoring a science/religion/something event that was being discussed. It turns out that (shock) people just weren't talking about it as incredibly frequently as they had been when it started trending.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
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.
Perhaps that so many people are talking about wikileaks, it has stopped trending. Just like what was required for Justin Bieber.
Obviously, everybody should just obsessively tweet #heilwhale until the problem resolves itself.
Extra credit will, naturally, be awarded for terrifying photochops of the failwhale with Chertoff's skull-like face...
This is all so fucked up, we should all go back to basic internet principles. The internet should not be used for anything other than porn.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
According to one of the commenters, this may be a result of adjusting the algorithms to git rid of endless "Bieber" related trends.
At what price Bieber Freedom?
If a forest of trees fall, but no one can report it, did it really happen?
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?
I think they were being censored, but it is hard to tell for certain.
Anyway, the latest Wikileak states that there is going to be a huge scandal and uproar about the ne
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Blame Justin Bieber
What happened was... all the JB fans were skewing the trending topics by tweeting about him all the time.
So twitter changed TTs from being a measure of amount to a measure of growth (or derivative)
And I think wikileaks grew slower, hence no TTs.
how long until
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.
"And now this. Could it have occurred to those people that the US government isn't behind every one of those things?"
Nope; this is slashdot. Very little critical thinking, but a lot of fanaticism. Many of the people here can't get their tinfoil wrapped heads around the concept of Occam's Razor.
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.
Washington (CNN) -- U.S. officials at the Pentagon and State Department denied Friday knowing of any efforts to take down the WikiLeaks website or asking companies to do so, and added "Please don't ask me that question again", whilst furtively looking over their shoulders.
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
Which 'way of life' is "*THE* American" one?
The top 2% of the American population that control 90% of the wealth?
Or the bottom 50% who have zero assets?
This whole thing is hilarious.
Its almost as if one can see a prequel of Snowcrash playing out in real life!
Franchise America will be here soon :) Cognitive dissonance can, in others, be highly entertaining.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
Twitter, like Google, has been close to Obama. [Citation Needed] Please refrain from saying something like this without actually backing it up.
Computers can reverse entropy.
Seriously. Twitter is a company and will censor shit as all communication/media companies do from time to time. Twitter isn't "the voice of the people" or any shit like that. It is an inane website for mostly inane people to display their inanity in 140 characters and track the other inane peoples reactions. The only thing Twitter added to the systems that came before it was easy mobile access and popularity tracking, and no one actually seems to use the mobile version any more.
It is killing me that our already dumb society is trying to dumb itself down to thoughts that can fit in 140 characters.
P.S. Someone should invent a social media symbolic language. I bet you could cover the majority of posts with very few symbols.
========
CINC, 4th Penguin Legion
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.
You don't need to be competent to try and bully people. Quite the opposite, in fact. By contrast, keeping secret things secret (and deciding in a cogent manner what should be secret) does require competence.
Something bad is coming when people are suddenly anxious to tell the truth.
Assange is neither, at this point in time.
Something bad is coming when people are suddenly anxious to tell the truth.
And it belongs on /.
For the last few years, things have been moving into the cloud. Somehow decentralized systems like irc have been replaced with centralized social media platforms. Nice cheap hosting and sharing services with some teeny, tiny clauses in their tos have become widely available.
Wikileaks is the perfect storm that tests just how much we can trust the life in the cloud.
Maybe RMS, that guy who looks and talks like Jesus was right all along.
The summary mentions the role of twitter during the Iranian unrest following the election.
Let me point out the obvious:
* Twitter is a company based in the US. Iran is a non-friendly regime to the US.
* If there were a twitter equivalent based in Iran, you can be sure it would have been busy about the cable leaks.
Got it?
In general, pretending that the parallel with the Iranian incident has any merit can be thought of as a lame effort at sarcasm at best and to be ignorant/uneducated at worst.
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!"
> One of Twitter's engineers has chimed in over the weekend
This whistle-blower should post the evidence that twitter is censoring wikileaks on wikileaks.
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.
This is only slightly less retarded than asking why the mainstream media tends to run interference for Democrats, spinning everything they do in a positive light even if it's something that would have a Republican hanging from a cross on capitol hill.
Yeah and I bet your post will be modded down because everyone here is a commie librul! Wake up LAMESTREAM media. Do you think Clinton would have been censured or Spitzer forced to resign if they were not Republicans? How about all those Democrats like Sanford, Ensign and Vitter who were given a pass on their sex scandal and remained in office?
Don't even get me started on the last Democratic administration in the White House! Between the illegal wiretaps on US Citizens, the erosion of civil liberties, starting two wars where hundreds of thousand innocent civilians died, a treasury secretary and democratic appointed fed chair Bernanke telling BoA to lie on their SEC filings to cover financial issues did the LAMESTREAM media cover any of this in detail? No, they just glossed over it and used their media empire controlled by the nefarious liberal Rupert Murdoch to change the public discourse on seriously illegal stuff. The democratic VP at the time, Dick Cheney, even leaked classified documents containing the name of a current undercover operative to the press and then lied to congress! A republican Bill Clinton was censured for lying about a BJ but a leak of classified information that put a undercover operative at risk(more people than the pentagon says has been hurt by the wikileaks information) and nothing happens to them! The Democratic president at the time, George Bush, is even going bragging that he committed war crimes without any calls from the press that action be taken against him. You can be if it were a Republican in charge then they would have been impeached if not sent to the Hague.
You even have the librul media repeating false claim by democrats that giving money to really, really rich people who won't spend it is better for the economy than giving it to poor people who will immediately spend every penny(because, well, poor and things like food, rent and heating costs money that they do not have to spend.) I bet if it was republicans making those claims they would be laughed at by every media organization.
And don't get me started on the Bircher's/Tea Party advocates in the democratic party and their queen Sarah. You can bet if they were a fringe of the Republicans and not Democrats they would be scorned as unserous and a little dumb rather than celebrated by the libruls at Fox News.
The media is totally biased against Republicans!!!!!
P.S. You’re an idiot.
P.P.S. The problem isn’t Republican vs Democrat for media interference, the problem is those in power vs the rest of us. Favorable stories give the reporters access and “credibility” with the people they cover. Write a bad story and you can be black balled and see major obstacles for your career. What seems to make it worse is that it doesn’t matter who is in power the media will uncritically report whatever they are told and rather than fact check you get an equally biased and BS sound bite from the “other” side to give the appearance of balance. Republicans win, Democrats win and we the Citizens get screwed.
That's ironic.
1) There's good evidence the CIA *are* behind it.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article27005.htm
2) Elected officials (Joe Liberman) took credit for it
http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/01/amazon/
http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/12/how_lieberman_got_amazon_to_drop_wikileaks.php
Large scale conspiracies and secrets can be held for fairly lengthy durations. Decades even, when the information is worth keeping secret. Look at projects like the F-117. Likewise, there are some aviation projects which have been ongoing for decades and all we know is, to paraphrase, by even today's standards, they seem pure science fiction.
Conspiracies happen all the time. But, contrary to common misconception, they need not be nefarious. Some times they are a birthday party. Other times, they save lives and no one ever knows; or at least not for many decades.
But, as you rightly point out, there are costs associated with conspiracies. IMOHO, you left out one variable. What is the benefit of a conspiracy in comparison to maintaining it. By that measure alone, the conspiracy cries here are just dumb. Spending political capital on issues which largely don't matter to the public would be as dumb as believing there is a conspiracy here.
Who knows, there may be a conspiracy at work here. But at the end of the day, there is absolutely zero reason to believe there is a conspiracy which means, for now, we're operating in the realm of the truly paranoid.
Iran proved that.
Usernames can't be trending topics, and a ton of people use the tag #wikileaks.
They show that the highest levels of our government (Secretary of State) were actively aware and involved in knowingly kidnapping, toturing, and otherwise abusing a man they _knew_ to be innocent. That is not newsworthy? That is something we didn't already know about. I mean, we knew it happened, but we didn't know how far up it went.
Surely such a claim, that the government would exert such power over privately-owned corporations would require at least one example, right?
Because it isn't as if they can just haul the most powerful communications companies in the world in to their offices and start making demands, right?
SURELY we'd know about that sort of abuse? RIGHT?
We're being reasonable here. Thoughtful, critical-thinking types who don't just blindly repeat things...
Swiss bank freezes Julian Assange's (personal) account
Someone claiming to be a former member of the Board of Directors of Wikileaks claims Assange is using funds for his own personal gains, via an e-mail sent through an anonymous remailer with no substantiating details. Looks like an attempt to discredit Wikileaks, and not even a very good one - I'd guess some random kook rather than any kind of government-sanctioned activity.