Twitter Censored in Pakistan

Over at the English PEN site, I have rehearsed the issue of social media censorship. Here’s an excerpt:

When such controversies flare, it is also important to remember that the social networks are corporations, intent on making money. This was made very clear to us all this week, when Facebook was listed on the NASDAQ. To justify its $100 billion valuation, the site needs new users, and it will get them from populous countries with technical infrastructure… like China, India and Pakistan. In order to secure access to these users, the company will have to co-operate (some might even say ‘collaborate’) with the governments of those countries. We should expect to see more censorship of the sort Pakistani users saw over the weekend, and also more sophisticated forms of control. People notice a nationwide social media blackout, but they are less likely to perceive a ‘throttling’ of internet access during periods of unrest or dissent. We are also likely to see an automated sieving of messages, where a site will appear to function normally, but certain keywords or phrases (for example, ‘Jasmine Revolution’, ‘Tiananmen Massacre’ or ‘Mohammed Cartoons’) will be filtered. Can we trust the large corporations to resist governments’ demands to filter? What if the sovereign wealth funds in authoritarian regimes buy up Facebook and Twitter shares?

You can read the whole thing on the PEN site. I have blogged previously about the problem of “Corporate Silos” and the need to diversify our social media use, though I am as useless as anyone at actually following through on this.

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