Twitter Censorship Plan Results in Day-Long Tweet Blackout Protest

  • Organizing with the hashtag #TwitterBlackout, Twitter users collaborated to speak out (or rather go silent) on January 28 for a day-long protest against Twitter’s new plan to block tweets and accounts from certain countries.
  • “The protest follows less than two weeks after thousands of websites, including Wikipedia, Google, and Reddit, protested two controversial anti-piracy bills, the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act, by shutting down or posting notices outlining the downsides of the proposed legislation,” reports The Huffington Post.
  • “Yet this online protest, and others like it, have relied on Twitter as a means of communicating between protestors and buttressing support for their movements. It remains to be seen whether silencing tweets will call attention to the cause, or whether the mute accounts will go unnoticed.”
  • Twitter said it remains committed to free speech online: “We try to keep content up wherever and whenever we can, and we will be transparent with users when we can’t. The Tweets must continue to flow,” Twitter wrote on its blog.

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