Slashdot Mirror
Did Armenia Censor Facebook? (mashable.com)
An anonymous Slashdot reader writes:
"Only one day after Twitter was throttled in Turkey during an ill-fated coup attempt, social media again seemed to become a target during unrest in Armenia's capital, Yerevan," reports Mashable. A day after Turkey's president declared that Friday's coup has failed, armed men had taken hostages in nearby Armenia, and "The National Security Service accused the hostage takers' supporters of spreading false rumors on the internet about an uprising and the seizure of other buildings," according to Reuters. "Early Sunday, journalists and others in Armenia used Twitter to suggest Facebook had been blocked for a period as the incident unfolded," Mashable reports, noting that later Facebook access appeared to be restored. Facebook was unavailable for comment.
Oh! The pain! Please stop!
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
We can only hope.
Point, Betteridge!
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
How dare these third world dictatorships try to censor Facebook. That's America and Israel's job!
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Any communications system with a central point of failure (e.g. simple vulnerability to deliberate censorship, such as reliance on a given data center) will be a target during any kind of power struggle, coup, war, or other time of political dissent.
Real lawyers write in C++
This all looked like a staged coup an it all went according to a plan. The lists of people to be arrested or only removed from positions of power were compiled quite in advance. Well done Erdo!
Fakebook TWITter, and all the rest of the data mining sites need to be shut down for good, and data mining needs to be made illegal. All of this worldwide and forever!
What is surprising about this? Anything? Facebook and Twitter are private for-cashola businesses, not governmental ogs... Other government can and will block them as they see a benefit to their junta.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
fkn gay
EOM
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
and the mob can and should be silenced during periods of national emergency, because potential for things to get out of control, based on misinformation, provocative lies and half truths, is very high.
Seems to be a lot of censoring of right-wing posts lately (i.e during the election). The 'Being Libertarian' page seems to have been completely taken down. This worries me more than some tin-pot country doing it.
Worries me too. And ultimately it doesn't matter if it's a government org or a private company doing the manipulating, if someone or a small group is able to misinform millions of people it worries me.
Isn't Facebook itself all about misinforming?
You're not supposed to smoke the tea bags, dimwit.
It's clear governments have caught on with how social media can manipulate information. Simply because there is no verification process and it's a connection with the outside world that many governments would just like to turn off in times of turmoil. North Korea and Cuba for example basically control any connections with outside world internet. In fact North Korea is basically a internal network except for a few higher ups in business and government. I laugh when Facebook decides it's going to give WiFi services to all these third world countries many of which have dictatorships or ruled by secular groups not much beyond just terrorists.
Not to mention these places have little in basic services like running water, power, or sanitation and can't even afford a Chromebook to even access the internet.
Even in places you would not expect censorship like the EU and US you now see decisions being made on filtering content. While it seems perfectly fine to most to block child pornography and smut in a McDonalds. It sets in motion a acceptance that someone can decide for you what you can access on the internet.
From the incident, it was evident that the violence of right to express is coming along. So is the ban. Will it really solve any problem? I don't think so!