CyberLaw Blog

Archive for May 31st, 2010

Twitter accused of censoring Israeli flotilla attack tweets – Hashtags down | TechEye: “Twitter accused of censoring Israeli flotilla attack tweets”

The recent Israeli attack on a flotilla of aid-worker ships in Gaza prompted a huge response on Twitter, but many users are now accusing the social media website of censoring material relating to the event.

Users began using the hashtag #flotilla with their reports and comments about the Gaza incident, which allows others to sort and search through results based on the topic, similar to other forms of web tagging. However, it was reported that at around 11am GMT the popular hashtag stopped working, resulting in numerous Twitter errors.

This could have simply been a case of Twitter not being able to handle the sheer volume of people using the hashtag, or it could have been an anti-spam system that kicked in automatically based on the number of uses within a short time frame. A large number of people do not accept either of these possibilities, however, and have accused Twitter of censorship.

Many of these users are now using a new hashtag, #freedomflotilla, which has remained in operation despite it trending in the same way the #flotilla one did earlier today. We tested the hashtags and found that #flotilla was periodically not working, but the others worked fine.

New reports have revealed that even the #gaza and #israel hashtags went down for a period of time, but both are now working again. It may be a case that they are only going down at peak periods of usage when the servers cannot handle the load. It may also be that the problem is not the hashtags themselves, but rather the search engine which is trying to handle the large volumes.

This may be a simple case of overload, but many Twitter users are asking the question if Twitter is as impartial as it should be in situations like the one that has arisen today.

Did Twitter censor the #flotilla hashtag following the Israel attack? | Technology | guardian.co.uk:

Users of the microblogging service complain at apparent censorship as discussion grows around deaths on convoy – but it isn’t justified”

BBC News – Pakistani court removes Facebook ban

Page last updated at 6:51 GMT, Monday, 31 May 2010 7:51 UK

Anti-Facebook protest in Quetta on 27 May 2010 Muslims consider it un-Islamic to draw pictures of the Prophet Muhammad

A court in Pakistan has ordered the authorities to restore the Facebook social networking site.

The court had ordered the blocking of the site after a petition was filed against a competition featuring caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad.

The petition, filed by a lawyers’ group called the Islamic Lawyers’ Movement, said the contest was ‘blasphemous’.

Pakistan’s deputy attorney told the court on Monday that Facebook had withdrawn the competition.

The Facebook page in question contained caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad and characters from other religions, including Hinduism and Christianity, as well as comments both critical and supportive of Islam.

On Monday, Justice Ejaz Ahmed Chaudhry of the Lahore High Court reversed his 19 May order to the Pakistani authorities to block the site.

‘Restore Facebook. We don’t want to block access to information,’ Justice Chaudhry told the court.

He asked the government to develop a system to find out how countries like Saudi Arabia were blocking access to ‘blasphemous’ content on the internet.

‘It is the government’s job to take care of such things, which spark resentment among the people and bring them onto the streets.

‘They should take steps to block any blasphemous content on the internet,’ Justice Chaudhry said.

Last week, Pakistan restored access to popular video sharing website YouTube only after blocking some pages for ’sacrilegious content’.

Correspondents say that the internet is uncensored in Pakistan but the government monitors content by routing all traffic through a central exchange.

In the past, Pakistan has often blocked access to pornographic sites and sites with anti-Islamic content.

It has deemed such material as offensive to the political and security establishment of the country, says the BBC’s M Ilyas Khan in Islamabad.

In 2007, the government banned the YouTube site, allegedly to block material offensive to the government of Pervez Musharraf.

The action led to widespread disruption of access to the site for several hours. The ban was later lifted.