Tag: Twitter

This week the Open State Foundation, creator of Politwoops, uploaded more than one million deleted politicians’ tweets to the Internet Archive, preserving the information for the public record. The collection archives the deleted tweets of 10,404 politicians worldwide, which were published before Twitter cut off Open State’s access to its Application Programming Interface, or API. Unfortunately, Twitter still refuses to reinstate access to the API, which means that people in 32 countries can’t see what politicians are deleting right now.

Last week, Twitter shut down a tool that helps people hold politicians accountable in 29 countries around the world. The Netherlands-based civil society group Open State Foundation created Politwoops, which scans the Twitter accounts of politicians for tweets they’ve deleted. Deleted tweets can provide insight to the viewpoints of public officials, and journalists have been using Politwoops to keep representatives accountable for what they say publicly. This is an especially disappointing decision because Twitter has been a champion of transparency and free expression for some time.

Turkey recently blocked users’ access to Twitter and YouTube in an effort to censor material posted by users, just as it did in March of last year. If users are willing to fight back against government censorship, social media companies should support them in their efforts

Last month, Twitter released its most recent transparency report, and it provides important insights into the evolving issue of freedom of expression online. The report confirms that Turkey has become a hotbed of censorship since Tayyip Erdogan was sworn in as President in August 2014 and launched a crackdown on the media.

Activists involved in the organization of the first Gezi park protests in Turkey are currently standing trial, which Amnesty International describes as “a vindictive, politically motivated show trial without a shred of evidence of actual crimes.”

Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan blocks Twitter, another step in his ongoing war against the open internet.

This morning eight major internet companies — AOL, Apple, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Twitter, and Yahoo! — issued a broad and powerful call for surveillance reform. The joint statement represents the strongest stance yet by U.S. internet companies on government surveillance and has the potential to shift the debate in Washington.

Last month, a Chilean criminal court dismissed all charges against Rodrigo Ferrari, who was charged in February with the criminal offense of “identity usurpation,” for allegedly authoring the twitter accounts @losluksic, @luksicandronico, and @andronicoluksic, Twitter accounts that parodied the activities of the Luksic family, among the wealthiest families in Chile.

Today, Access filed a Freedom of Information Act request before the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the U.S. Department of Justice to ask which governments are requesting user information through mutual legal assistance treaties. This filing comes two days after a blogger and lawyer Rodrigo Ferrari was formally charged by Chilean prosecutors, who obtained his Twitter information through such a process, which was seemingly executed improperly.

Government requests for the digital information of citizens around the world are growing exponentially. Google and Twitter revealed that a rising number of countries are using this mechanism to conduct investigations. Requests to Twitter jumped by 20% in the second quarter of 2012. Google also observed a jump of more than 70% of requests since 2009, totaling 21,389 requests for information about 33,634 users in the last six months of 2012.