Is Twitter Actively Censoring and Blocking Searches for #flotilla? | Hacker News Reader

Is Twitter Actively Censoring and Blocking Searches for #flotilla?

neosmart.net

26 pointsComputerGuru21 comments

I have no doubt twitter censors content.

When George Bush was up here in Canada on a speaking tour last year I was in the first car stopped at the light while the police blocked traffic for the motorcade.

I was sitting there, so I took pictures and tweeted about the experience while waiting and while the ex-president's cars went by.

By the time I got home 20 minutes later, those tweets were no longer in my account.

I know they hit the twitterverse because a couple of my friends were able to re-tweet what I'd posted because they were using desktop clients that stored the messages.

My reaction was surprising at the time: I wasn't mad. I was scared.

I can understand why officials would be worried about tweets giving away details that could be used maliciously, but this was happening in real time. The president was THERE, at that moment. There was less intelligence value to my tweets than there was in the advertising for his attendance at the speaking engagement.

But still, it was scary and I understand much more clearly what people living in oppressive regimes must feel daily.

I have those tweets, reposted by others on my behalf, so the Internet healed itself. Can't stop the signal. . . .

Do you really think Twitter, home of the Fail Whale, can actually process your tweets in real time just to censor you? What would they get out of that? Money spent on hardware and software just to discourage people from using their product? Seems unlikely.

What seems likely is database replication issues or a buggy caching algorithm. You are not important enough to censor.

No, they aren't. It works fine for me.

They still are for me (Florida). Where are you located?

Testing it from the states (LA) and the middle east (jordan) and it's definitely blocked. And it's not just #flotilla, also israil and other tags related to the topic are being blocked. Israil shows up in the TT list, but the search doesn't work. The rest are completely hidden from TT as well.

Yup, I'm also in Los Angeles area and a search for #flotilla gets no results, not even a "No Results" message.

Germany: search works, Israil shows up in the TT list. This all seems to be very inconsistent, looks more like a technical problem.

Sweden here, not working.

Works on my machine too (located in Denmark).

I really want to think that this is a technical error.

"Israil" was another term that is broken in the search. It's now showing as trending for me. I'm hoping "flotilla" will follow.

Actually, it's still broken. While it shows in the trending topics lists, try actually clicking on "Israil" and you get a technical error page: http://twitter.com/search?q=%C4%B0srail

Yeah, the search is still broken. But at least it's showing now? It seems too inconsistent to be active censoring.

I don't know - I don't think "Israil" was being blocked from being a TT, at least, it wasn't on trendistic while not being on twitter.

I think "inconsistency" and active censorship go hand-in-hand: you have to manually block certain topics, and so the ones you didn't catch slip through. And maybe you need to make it less than perfect to make sure you can always claim "technical difficulties."

I just find it hard to believe that twitter's staff was working around the clock during the Iranian elections to make sure that everything kept going smooth, but right now it's been 12 or so hours and their search is broken for a similarly-important news story.

I have to give Twitter more credit than that.

Politics of the issue aside, censoring anything could seriously hurt Twitter. Even if we're cynical and we don't give them the benefit of a doubt integrity-wise, it's still a stupid move for them from a PR standpoint.

It's a holiday weekend in the USA. This could easily be something like an automated system designed to prevent spamming the trending topics that is broken or needing operator/editor attention that's in short supply. Casting the accusation of 'censorship' without evidence is hair-trigger indignation-as-sport.

I hope this is a technical error too. But I'm unable to search for #flotilla at the moment too, but searches for other terms work fine.

One hopes there will be a reasonable explanation.

If you're logged out the search appears to work. It also works via the API. Seems to be a bug that only manifests itself while logged in

But clearly it's censorship!!11!

searches work for me (europe) but people continue to complain that they aren't working.

Is all this about searches or about trending reports?

Both. Some topics are clearly trending (see screenshots from trendistic in TFA) while not being listed on twitter, and searches for topics (listed as trending or otherwise) are giving technical errors for most people.

I'm a member of the Chuck (tv show) community. We encountered similar issues in trending efforts. Some hash tags will simply not trend, and there's no apparent rhyme or reason. Twitter support never responded to any inquiries as to why some seemingly innocuous keywords (like #SaveChuck) would not trend, but others would.

I assume they have their reasons, and as a free service they have no obligation. It's still annoying for the user community.

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