The Twitter Censorship Blunder
Like all social networks that boast an impressive following, there are expectations and demands that certain means of censorship should be put in place to protect it's users. We've seen it done all before, with sites such as Facebook and MySpace sporting 'report' functions and censorship crawlers. But in the case of Twitter, the site doesn't facilitate any 'report' functions. It relies solely on the number of times an account has been 'blocked' by its users, and only then will it consider a ban.
There has been a growing number of protests and concerns voiced by the Twitter population as to the measures of censorship that should be put in place to stop spammers and abusive morons using the site wrongly. Celebrities themselves have been backing the demand for better protection measures, such as Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, who has previously advocated the support of campaigns such as @blocksunday, a community collective of anti-trollers.
Today, Twitter announced that it was crawling through it's database and eradicating potential spammers and offenders. And the end result? Totally horrible. Thousands of innocent Twitter users were 'accidentally' blocked, with Mashable once again all over the news.
Twitter has since made an announcement, in an attempt to recitfy the major blunder:
"Earlier today, we accidentally suspended a number of accounts.
We regret the human error that led to these mistaken suspensions and we are working to restore the affected accounts—we expect this to be completed in the next several hours.
One additional note: some the accounts suspended were using the third-party site Tweetlater. However, Tweetlater is not to blame for these suspensions nor is it in violation of our Terms."
What's that you say, human error...? Are you sure? In my opinion, I think the developers got lazy - but on the plus side, at least they are taking measures to censor out spam and offensice content... I for one, am sick of being followed by myriads of sex ads.
I didn't get suspended accidentally, so... I'm happy ^_^
What were your experiences?
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