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Censorship on Twitter
by staff report via sy - News Corp. Thursday, Jan 26 2012, 7:19pm
international / mass media / other press

Information control on Social Networks

Google and CIA business partner have been selectively suppressing information for years that is why Google is facing anti-trust commissions/courts around the globe. Facebook will soon begin some form of selective censorship as pressure mounts to WITHHOLD critical information from society. Elites figure they've got you hooked on social networks so people will accept Orwellian information control, hence the open disclosure of Twitter entering the censorship business.

Twitter labels this selective CENSORSHIP exercise, 'refinement:'

TWITTER has refined its technology so it can censor messages on a country-by-country basis.

The additional flexibility is likely to raise fears that the short-messaging company's commitment to free speech may be weakening.

It comes as it expands into new countries in an attempt to broaden its audience and make more money.

But Twitter sees the censorship tool as a way to ensure individual messages, or "tweets," remain available to as many people as possible while it navigates a maze of different laws around the world.

Before, when Twitter erased a tweet it disappeared throughout the world. Now, a tweets containing content breaking a law in one country can be taken down there and still be seen elsewhere.

"As we continue to grow internationally, we will enter countries that have different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression," Twitter said in a blog post.

"Some differ so much from our ideas that we will not be able to exist there. Others are similar but, for historical or cultural reasons, restrict certain types of content, such as France or Germany, which ban pro-Nazi content," Twitter said.

China, notably, blocks Twitter, a situation which Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey described recently as "unfortunate and disappointing."

© 2012 News Limited

[Do not be fooled, extremist content is a guise for censoring anything 'they' don't like; which raises the issue, who are 'they' to make decisions for the global masses? One day the MAJORITY will tire of self-serving/interested MINORITIES lording over them and dictating what information is fit for 'consumption'.]

http://tinyurl.com/7gzhpdk

COMMENTS

better late
by jo Friday, Jan 27 2012, 3:21am

where have u been? Twitter has been censoring links and data long before this release.

FBI Wants New App to Wiretap the Internet - well of course they do!
by staff report via reed - CommonDreams Friday, Jan 27 2012, 5:26am

The FBI's Strategic Information and Operations Center (SOIC) posted a 'Request for Information (RFI)' online last week seeking companies to build a social network monitoring system for the FBI. The 12-page document spells out what the bureau wants from such a system and invites potential contractors to reply by February 10, 2012.

It says the application should provide information about possible domestic and global threats superimposed onto maps "using mash-up technology".

It says the application should collect "open source" information and have the ability to:

-Provide an automated search and scrape capability of social networks including Facebook and Twitter.

-Allow users to create new keyword searches.

-Display different levels of threats as alerts on maps, possibly using color coding to distinguish priority. Google Maps 3D and Yahoo Maps are listed among the "preferred" mapping options.

-Plot a wide range of domestic and global terror data.

-Immediately translate foreign language tweets into English.

It notes that agents need to "locate bad actors...and analyze their movements, vulnerabilities, limitations, and possible adverse actions". It also states that the bureau will use social media to create "pattern-of-life matrices" -- presumably logs of targets' daily routines -- that will aid law enforcement in planning operations.

New Scientist magazine reports today:

The US Federal Bureau of Investigation has quietly released details of plans to continuously monitor the global output of Facebook, Twitter and other social networks, offering a rare glimpse into an activity that the FBI and other government agencies are reluctant to discuss publicly. The plans show that the bureau believes it can use information pulled from social media sites to better respond to crises, and maybe even to foresee them. [...]

"These tools that mine open source data and presumably store it for a very long time, do away with that kind of privacy. I worry about the effect of that on free speech in the US" -- Jennifer Lynch of the Electronic Frontier Foundation

The use of the term "publicly available" suggests that Facebook and Twitter may be able to exempt themselves from the monitoring by making their posts private. But the desire of the US government to watch everyone may still have an unwelcome impact, warns Jennifer Lynch at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based advocacy group.

Lynch says that many people post to social media in the expectation that only their friends and followers are reading, which gives them "the sense of freedom to say what they want without worrying too much about recourse," says Lynch. "But these tools that mine open source data and presumably store it for a very long time, do away with that kind of privacy. I worry about the effect of that on free speech in the US".

* * *

The BBC reports:

The FBI issued the request three weeks after the US Department of Homeland Security released a separate report into the privacy implications of monitoring social media websites.

It justified the principle of using information that users have provided and not opted to make private.

"Information posted to social media websites is publicly accessible and voluntarily generated. Thus the opportunity not to provide information exists prior to the informational post by the user," it says.[...]

The London-based campaign group, Privacy International, said it was worried about the consequences of such activities.

"Social networks are about connecting people with other people - if one person is the target of police monitoring, there will be a dragnet effect in which dozens, even hundreds, of innocent users also come under surveillance," said Gus Hosein, the group's executive director.

"It is not necessarily the case that the more information law enforcement officers have, the safer we will be.

"Police may well find themselves overwhelmed by a flood of personal information, information that is precious to those it concerns but useless for the purposes of crime prevention."

* * *

The Fierce Government website reports on 'refining raw social media into intelligence gold':

The notion that the future can be predicted by trends expressed in collective social media output is one that has gained increased currency in academic writing. A January analysis (.pdf) published by the Rand Corp. of tweets using the #IranElection hashtag during 2009 and early 2010 found a correlation between appearance of swear words and protests. The study also found a shift that indicated the protest movement was losing momentum when swearing shifted from curses at the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to curses at an opposition figure.

A March 2011 paper published in the Journal of Computational Science (abstract) also posited that movements of the Dow Jones Industrial Average could be predicted to an accuracy of 86.7 percent by changes of national mood reflected in Tweets. According to The Economist, British hedge fund Derwent Capital Markets has licensed the algorithm to guide the investments of a $41 million fund.

Copyright applies.

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/01/26-3