This week, my friend Gilad Lotan of SocialFlow wrote an excellent blog post explaining how trending topics really work, in an attempt it seems, to put rumors of censorship to rest. Twitter has been dealing with these rumors for quite some time, and last December publicly explained that Trending Topics are about velocity, not volume, […]
Today, the OpenNet Initiative has released a paper, authored by Helmi Noman and myself, enumerating the widespread use of American- and Canadian-built filtering technologies in the Middle East and North Africa. The paper, entitled “West Censoring East: The Use of Western Technologies by Middle East Censors 2010-2011“, looks closely at Websense, McAfee’s SmartFilter, and Netsweeper […]
Well, here we go again…the mainstream media tonight jumped on rumors that Algeria had shut down the Internet, without bothering to check their facts with people on the ground. They didn’t check Twitter either; Algerians were tweeting throughout. So far, neither the Telegraph nor Mashable–the two outlets primarily responsible for the rumor–have bothered to issue […]