[governance] Wikileaks - ISOC

[Katitza Rodriguez]

Twitter made a blog post yesterday addressing this very issue:
<http://blog.twitter.com/2010/12/to-trend-or-not-to-trend.html>. I sent
you the analysis from the Open Net Initiative who works on documenting
Internet Censorship. 

If you have data that shows that Twitter is being quashing the
#wikileaks hashtag, please feel free to send it to me and our tech team
might be very interested in taking a look at it. 

We can discuss is their algorithm actually is good or not... BTW,
twitter is working fine. It is actually one of the key mediums we have
to spread the word of our messages. It will be silly to boycott twitter
as some proposals on twitter said. It will only harm us.. this is my
personal opinion...

Best,

Katitza

On Thu, 09 Dec 2010 19:08:16 -0200, "Carlos A. Afonso" <ca at cafonso.ca>
wrote:
> Sorry, Katitza, it does not explain it. It is trending massively by
> velocity and volume. It is clear there is more than an algorithm
> intervening.
> 
> --c.a.
> 
> On 12/09/2010 05:57 PM, Katitza Rodriguez wrote:
>> Hi
>>
>> Twitter is not blocking. They change they algorithm many time ago. A
>> good tech and data analysis explanation is available here:
>>
>> #WikiLeaks&  Twitter Trending Topics: Manual Interference or Algorithms
>> as Usual?
>> http://opennet.net/blog/2010/12/wikileaks-twitter-trending-topics-manual-interference-or-algorithms-usual
>>
>> "the problem with claiming that Twitter is blacklisting any particular
>> term ultimately comes down to a likely misunderstanding of the mechanics
>> behind trending terms. Volume alone does not dictate what is trending -
>> if that were the case, barring any stop-word list, we would see terms
>> like “lol” and “Bieber” constantly trending, and, ultimately, the lack
>> of churn in trending topics would make them a useless feature on the
>> site. For this reason, the likely major component is the velocity of
>> volume rather than volume itself (the algorithm itself is not publicly
>> known)."
>>
>> ".... perhaps the Wikileaks story should have been trending, and
>> perhaps the algorithm is due for some form of an overhaul to balance the
>> needs of Twitter the company and Twitter the communications platform.
>> The situation, then, is not whether or not Wikileaks is being
>> discriminated against, but whether or not we value that algorithmic
>> discrimination as users."
>>
>>
>>
>> On Thu, 9 Dec 2010 16:00:05 +0800, Jeremy Malcolm<jeremy at ciroap.org>
>> wrote:
>>> On 09/12/2010, at 2:53 PM, Ian Peter wrote:
>>>
>>> So far we have seen everydns, mastercard, amazon and paypal cave in to
>>> political pressure, although there is no legal action against
>>> wikileaks, let alone a successful one. On the other hand, ISOC (and
>>> presumably PIR) and Facebook of all bedfellows have stood firmly on
>>> the side of a free Internet.
>>>
>>> and Twitter.
>>>
>>> I think an IGC statement on this issue would be useful!
>>>
>>> Do we want to say "we support Wikileaks" or do we want to say "we
>>> disapprove of the (lack of) process that has been followed in dealing
>>> with Wikileaks, and we think that a set of principles should be
>>> democratically developed to guide public and private responses in
>>> future similar circumstances"? Whilst I personally support Wikileaks,
>>> I think that the latter approach is more within the IGC's area of core
>>> competence, and would also distinguish our statement better from those
>>> of free speech groups et al.
>>
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