We are seeing calls for people to not boycott Twitter. Even Cent (The Young Turks) said it wouldn't be a good idea.
Cenk said at least people outside a nation would know what was going on, even if Twitter wouldn't be giving the people within a nation the messages they needed to get.
No, Cenk. Sorry.
Just think of it: We sit back and read the messages of desperate young people tweeting for help when there can be none. I can't think of anything worse.
BTW, I wonder why media people, once they grab part of the big media spotlight suddenly want the rest of us to become their captive audience.
Imagine, if during last year's Eqypt uprising, Twitter had been amenable to censoring, and we knew the addresses of those secret nodes with which they could communicate between themselves, and yet we couldn't transmit the information.
Wouldn't it be great that we could learn about hundreds being rounded up or even killed and though we knew how to get them to safe nodes, we couldn't tell them because the hashtags we use to do so were being censored by the Twits at Twitter in Egypt.
I know little about those nodes, but I do know that last year I retweeted any message from those I trust who did give directions to them so they would get to the activists whenever they could check in and read Twitter.
I also think that it is important that this came close after the big investment by Murcoch's Saudi Prince partner.
Many sources cite the Twitter desire to get into China, showing that the Twits have some onerous Chuztpah deciding they will act as censors where Google stopped playing.
I'm guessing their prince wants to make his investment back quickly.
And yes a 24 hour boycott isn't going to get the Twits to change their minds, I'm guessing.
Maybe we should start a move to another source. Facebook already has a lot of groups, but they all belong to someone, making it hard for individuals to block annoying people from their personal timeline. This was the bane of the old "forum" model. One moderator or the small group of leaders would be talked into allowing "gadflies" in the name of free speech only to see the copious complaints of such people driving good folks out of the group. One forum group even ousted the creator, a popular Twitter icon. (Okay, I know; Redundancy alert.)
Google +, Tumblr, are also alternatives. Yahoo has something. I'm sure I'm probably missing other sources too.
We really might want to transition to one of those formats. Does anyone know of more?
Leave info in comment section. Yeah, we do have to approve comments before they appear for the public , but that's only works as a troll gate. We see a notice of a message whenever we check in to write, and will react quickly.
BTW, just because I disagree with Cent right now it doesn't mean I won't continue to watch his show. It's part of the mix I try to get to each day.
Still, I do think that Twitter which is credited with helping to facilitate the Egypt uprising at least as much or more than Facebook did, is now going to play nice with repressive governments shows they don't get why we used it so much.
(i guess a link to this post will go to Twitter. I haven't dismantled the feedburner link because it's hard for me to understand how to set it up again, but my real intention was to write on our blog.)
I have a good post on all the arguments I could find from many sources against the Keystone XL pipeline that you could use to win arguments, but I will post that tomorrow morning after the boycott is over.
