In an announcement on its official blog, the micro-blogging service Twitter has said it will enable country-specific censorship of content on the site.

True to the form of the medium, the service was immediately abuzz with questions, criticisms and conspiracies about Thursday’s announcement.

In a bid to show the service can still be used for dissent, some users have called for a boycott on Saturday, organised around the hashtag #TwitterBlackout.

In a Forbes article highly circulated on the micro-blogging site early Friday, Mark Gibbs wrote that San Francisco, California-based Twitter was committing “social suicide” with the censorship announcement.

Gibbs’ article raised fears of an algorithm incapable of understanding the sarcasm that permeate the 140-character blasts comprising the service’s contents.

That “computer-driven” filtering for the up to 9,000 tweets per second the service produced last year could not possibly take context and tone into consideration.

Whereas Gibbs said the announcement equated to Twitter having “dug their own grave”, Alex Howard, a DC-based correspondent for Radar, a blog about emerging technologies, said “the fact that Twitter says they will transparently show the rest of the world what’s being censored is actually quite interesting, even innovative”.

A departure

Howard, who has little doubt the service will implement the country-specific censorship, said: “I don’t think this system was introduced to be symbolic.”

He says the proposal laid out in the blog post entitled “Tweets still must flow” could be a departure even from a similar practice by the search company, Google.

“Google makes raw data available of government requests for information but not the information itself,” Howard said.

Twitter will probably follow this model while also in the process “highlighting the contents of tweets that governments are seeking to block and even regions it’s happening in”, he said.

Similary, Jillian York, director of international freedom of expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, does not doubt the proposal amounts to censorship, but says it is the “best middle road” for a company looking to expand globally…

[continues at Al Jazeera]

“Either @rupertmurdoch is genuinely now on Twitter, or some disgruntled ex-NOTW journo just won the hacking Olympics.”

Less than two days after joining Twitter, media mogul Rupert Murdoch appears to have had his first brush with tweeting-before-thinking, after suggesting that the British have too many holidays for a “broke country”.

Though Mr Murdoch, who joined Twitter less than 48 hours ago and already has almost 40,000 followers, quickly deleted the message, it was preserved by some Twitter users and quickly spread around the website.

“Maybe Brits have too many holidays for broke country!” Mr Murdoch, who is holidaying on the Caribbean island of Saint Barthelemy, wrote about 6am Australian time.

Publish and be damned … the tweet that Murdoch withdrew.

His wife, Wendi Deng, also appears to have joined the increasingly ubiquitous microblogging site, quickly replied: “RUPERT!! delete tweet!!”

Within minutes the Wendi Deng account, which has not yet been verified and may not be genuine, continued: “EVERY1 @rupertmurdoch was only having a joke pROMSIE!!!”

Minutes later: “explaining to @rupertmurdoch about being careful with humor on line. sometimes it comes out as rude!”

About five hours later Mr Murdoch revealed his Twitter profile was causing people close to him some angst…

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/new-to-twitter-the-tweet-murdoch-took-down–fast-20120102-1phxs.html#ixzz1iPkaXDYh

After Christopher Hitchens passed away, the title of his book, God Is Not Great, started trending on Twitter. Here’s how some people, mostly “Christians,” reacted:

[Click above image for more Tweets]

Let’s take a trip with the Ghost of Christmas Future. The year is 2016, and George Bailey, a former banker, now a part-time consultant, is looking for a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage for a co-op in the super-hot neighborhood of Bedford Falls (BeFa). He has never missed a loan payment and has zero credit card debt. He submits his information to the online-only PotterBank.com, but halfway through the application process, the website asks for his Facebook login. Then his Twitter. Then LinkedIn. The cartoon loan officer avatar begins to frown as the algorithm discovers Mr. Bailey’s taxi-driving buddy Ernie was once turned down by PotterBank for a loan; then it starts browsing his daughter Zuzu’s photo album, “Saturday Nite!” And what was this tweet from a few years back: “FML, about to jump off a goddamn bridge”?

A new wave of startups is working on algorithms gathering data for banks from the web of associations on the internet known as “the social graph,” in which people are “nodes” connected to each other by “edges.” Banks are already using social media to befriend their customers, and increasingly, their customers’ friends. The specifics are still shaking out, but the gist is that eventually, social media will account for at least the tippy-top of the mountain of data banks keep on their customers.

“There is this concept of ‘birds of a feather flock together,’” said Ken Lin, CEO of the San Francisco-based credit scoring startup Credit Karma. “If you are a profitable customer for a bank, it suggests that a lot of your friends are going to be the same credit profile. So they’ll look through the social network and see if they can identify your friends online and then maybe they send more marketing to them. That definitely exists today.”

And in the last year or so, financial institutions have started exploring ways to use data from Facebook, Twitter and other networks to round out an individual borrower’s risk profile…

[continues at Betabeat]

“Eventually I figured it out,” reports one technology blogger, “but it was a big shock to see more messages appearing from John himself on the day after he’d died.” They also dedicated their first ebook to Pospisil, a Thanksgiving children’s story, because “I’d always thought we’d watch the world changing together…”

McLEAN, VA — In an anonymous industrial park, CIA analysts who jokingly call themselves the “ninja librarians” are mining the mass of information people publish about themselves overseas, tracking everything from common public opinion to revolutions.

The group’s effort gives the White House a daily snapshot of the world built from tweets, newspaper articles and Facebook updates.

The agency’s Open Source Center sometimes looks at 5 million tweets a day. The analysts are also checking out TV news channels, local radio stations, Internet chat rooms — anything overseas that people can access and contribute to openly.

The Associated Press got an apparently unprecedented view of the center’s operations, including a tour of the main facility. The AP agreed not to reveal its exact location and to withhold the identities of some who work there because much of the center’s work is secret.

From Arabic to Mandarin, from an angry tweet to a thoughtful blog, the analysts gather the information, often in a native tongue. They cross-reference it with a local newspaper or a clandestinely intercepted phone conversation. From there, they build a picture sought by the highest levels at the White House. There might be a real-time peek, for example, at the mood of a region after the Navy SEAL raid that killed Osama bin Laden, or perhaps a prediction of which Mideast nation seems ripe for revolt.

Read More: AP

Local arts blog LA Taco is fuming over the “callous” Twitter activity of LAPD Homicide Detective Sal LaBarbera. (As of December 2007, according to the Los Angeles Times, La Barbera was “a 20-year homicide veteran who heads the Watts homicide squad in LAPD’s South Bureau.”)

LaBarbera is certainly active on Twitter — throwing out RTs, #FFs and hashtags like he was born to the social-media generation. (The detective is also big on @ing journalists from local news stations and the Times.) His handle on the medium is pretty impressive for a weathered murder cop…

… and right out ahead of other police departments’ slow struggle to incorporate social media into their investigative work.

More on LA Weekly

Photo: Riemer Palstra (CC)

To tweet or not tweet where you’re rioting next? One option was to shut down social networks so that rioters couldn’t mass communicate. The other option was to allow them to tweet and text, then read their messages to find out what they’re planning next. The latter was able to prevent attacks on the Olympic site and London’s Oxford Street. BBC reports:

Police say they prevented attacks by rioters on the Olympic site and London’s Oxford Street after picking up intelligence on social networks.

Assistant Met Police Commissioner Lynne Owens told a committee of MPs officers learned of possible trouble via Twitter and Blackberry messenger.

But Acting Commissioner Tim Godwin said he had considered asking authorities to switch off social networks.

He said they provided intelligence but could also be misleading.

A number of politicians, media commentators and members of the police force have suggested that Twitter and Blackberry Messenger (BBM) had a role to play in the riots.

[Continues at BBC News]

The newest government in the world was designed with help from comments on the internet. God help us all.

After Iceland’s economic collapse in 2008, the island nation decided it was time to write a new constitution, this one not based on its parent country of Denmark but rather made from the original ideas of its citizens. Iceland’s small population of 320,000 elected 25 assembly members from 522 ordinary candidates (including lawyers, political science professors, journalists, and many other professions), who in turn opened their process up to the public in an unprecedented fashion.

The Constitutional Council was highly active on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Flickr, where they solicited comments and suggestions for the new government. On Friday July 29th, 2011, the Iceland parliament officially received the new constitution, comprised of 114 articles divided into 9 chapters. Set to be reviewed, and then put before vote for ratification by October 1st, the internet-assisted document marks a possible paradigm shift in governing. In the 21st Century, we’re writing our constitutions with social media. The future is a crazy place.

More on Singularity Hub

The NYPD has formed a new unit to track troublemakers who announce plans or brag about their crimes on Twitter, MySpace and Facebook. Newly named Assistant Commissioner Kevin O’Connor, one of the department’s online and gang gurus, has been put in charge of the new juvenile justice unit. He and his staff will mine social media, looking for info about troublesome house parties, gang showdowns and other potential mayhem, sources said.

The power of social media to empower both criminals and cops has been on full display in London this week, where riots and looting have been spreading dramatically. The rioters have been using Twitter and BlackBerry messages to choose targets for looting or burning – and to alert one another about police positions.

Read more: NY Daily News:

Is it what it seems or is it intentionally misleading in a clumsy attempt to spark race-related violence?

The Pentagon is developing plans to use social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter as both a resource and a weapon in future conflicts. Its research and development agency is offering $42 million in funding to anyone who can help.

Social media will change the nature of warfare just as surely as the telegraph, the radio and the telephone did, and the Pentagon is fearful of being caught short. Some of its goals were laid out in a document being circulated among potential researchers and is to be presented at a briefing on Tuesday in Arlington, Va., at the offices of the military contractor System Planning Corporation.

As social media play increasingly large roles in fomenting unrest in countries like Egypt and Iran, the military wants systems to be able to detect and track the spread of ideas both quickly and on a broad scale. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is soliciting innovative proposals to help build what would be, at its most basic level, an Internet meme tracker …

More in the NY Times

With instant access to knowledge via technology, it’s easy to get the wrong news. While some  hackers may expose a private tweet or e-mail, others create fake news, like the assassination of the American president. Los Angeles Times reports:

Former Rep. Anthony Weiner falsely said his Twitter account was hacked just before Memorial Day weekend. But over the holiday weekend, it looks like real hackers attacked the @foxnewspolitics verified account, one of several Twitter accounts run by FoxNews.com.

A group calling itself “ScriptKiddies” claimed responsibility for the hack and also declared it has ties to the international hacker collective Anonymous.

The Tweets began appearing just after 2 a.m. ET on Monday, July 4, an hour and date likely calculated to maximize the time the Tweets were up before the account owner noticed or could do anything about it. The fake messages announced the assassination of President Obama during a visit to Iowa, but there were no links to news reports on the incident.

More Tweets detailed the president’s condition and promised the shooter would be found.

The language of the messages did not match normal news style, sounding more like the amateur fiction it turned out to be.

[Continues at Los Angeles Times]

Everyone has at least one funny person they follow on Twitter just for the lulz, but sometimes the things they say would be even more laughable if they weren’t constantly spewing from the same avatar.

Peanutweeter changes that. The @Peanutweeter Tumblr blog and Twitter feed fulfill a very simple idea: Matching somewhat random Twitter posts with less-random Peanuts comics. The results are hilarious.

“The site arose from the concept that the amusing and sometimes outrageous tweets out there would be even funnier or sometimes darker if they came from someone that everyone could identify with,” site creator T. Jason Agnello told Wired.com by e-mail.

More on WIRED’s Underwire

French TV and radio presenters have been banned from mentioning social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter on air.

The country’s broadcasting watchdog has ruled that doing so would break guidelines on advertising.

Stations can still talk about services without naming them, it said.

The French government is seen by many internet watchers as overly keen to regulate in relation to new media and the web.

In a ruling, published online, the Conseil Superieur de l’Audiovisuel (CSA), said: “Referring viewers or listeners to the page of the social network without mentioning it has the character of information.

[Continues at BBC News]

Ryan Giggs. Photo: Allison Pasciuto

The worst kept secret in Britain has been completely undermined by an onslaught of tweets. Chris Gayomali reviews the Ryan Giggs affair for TIME:

Earlier this month Ryan Giggs, a professional soccer player who plays for the U.K.’s Manchester United, obtained a court-ordered injunction to keep secret the details of an extra-marital affair with British television personality Imogen Thomas. The short story is that he didn’t want the U.K. press writing about his misconducts.

The move appeared to backfire, however, when news of the injunction spread like wildfire through over 70,000 Twitter accounts, causing Mr. Giggs to take up legal action against “persons unknown” as well as the social network itself.

Legal experts assumed that gag orders breached on Twitter were protected because the website is outside of the British legal system’s jurisdiction.

However, in a surprising move, a senior executive from Twitter admitted to the Telegraph that it would turn user information over to the authorities if it were “legally required” to.

British Attorney General Dominic Grieve had previously warned that people who broke injunctions online were in for a “”rude shock,” and the admission calls into question legal jurisdictions on the internet (which we’ve already discussed extensively). Depending on how this shakes out, the admission could also open the floodgates for similarly aggrieved celebrities to follow suit.

Yesterday, we wrote about how courts (albeit American ones) have previously ordered information accessible only through private Facebook accounts be made available in public litigation, which suggests a trend of willingness among the social networks to comply with the law. Of course, the implications could prove critical to a user’s right to free speech on the internet, but again, it raises a question we’ll continue to see: How far should these protections extend?

Users will always find ways to circumnavigate legalities and protect their online identities (fake email accounts, ISP-addresses, etc.), but the line become hazy when social networks are faced with the dilemma of protecting their users (usually in their best interest) while complying with the law…

[continues at TIME]

When the Taliban ruled Afghanistan, they eschewed most modern technology, including television and music players. But in the latest sign of the hardline movement’s rapprochement with at least some areas of the modern world, the Taliban have embraced microblogging.

Their Twitter feed, @alemarahweb, pumps out several messages a day, keeping 993 followers up to date with often highly exaggerated reports of strikes against the “infidel forces” and the “Karzai puppet regime”. Most messages are in Pashtu, with links to news stories on the elaborate and multilingual website of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, as the Taliban’s shadow government likes to style itself.

Today, the feed broke into English for the first time, with a tweet about an attack on police in Farah province: “Enemy attacked in Khak-e-Safid, 6 dead.”

There is not much lively banter between the “emirate” and its Twitter followers, save for a cheerful “asalam alekum” sent last week to the Kavkaz Centre, a militant news site covering jihad in the Caucasus.

Many of the story links are broken as the Taliban’s official website, regularly evicted from servers or shut down by authorities, is constantly on the move.

KANSAS CITY, Missouri— A photo of two Transportation Security Administration agents doing a full pat down on a baby, approximately 8 months old, has gone viral.

It happened at the Kansas City International Airport.

A passenger, Jacob Jester, captured the image on his cell phone. Since he tweeted the picture on Saturday, it has had more than 200,000 hits.

The photo shows the helpless baby being held up in the air by his mother while the TSA workers do their job. Jester has an 8-month-old son and would not want his son to be subjected to a hand search by TSA agents.

More on NBC KSHB-TV

Abbottabad, Pakistan, from Shimla Hill. Photo: Fraz.khalid1

Without realizing, Sohaid Athar tweeted about the attacks on Osama bin Laden from the comforts of his suburban home in Abbottabad. Athar began tweeting his complaints about the noise disturbance from helicopters he heard about his home. After a few tweets, Athar and his followers began connecting the information of non-Pakistani helicopters and loud, vibrating, sounds in the area to the reported assassination of bin Laden. Athar was the first on the internet to publish real-time updates on the attack. Via The Raw Story:

An IT consultant who hoped for a quiet life in a summer resort town in Pakistan has become an Internet sensation as the first to report the attack on the world’s most wanted man.

Sohaib Athar was just another witty voice on micro-blogging site Twitter until he heard the sound of helicopters near his home in a Abbottabad, 30 miles (50 kilometres) north of Islamabad early Monday.

But Athar is now world famous with almost 90,000 Twitter “followers” — users who keep track of his messages — as the first person to record the attack on Osama bin Laden’s secret hideaway.

He was swamped with emails and interview requests from media around the globe and his blog was even attacked by Internet hackers.

[Continues at The Raw Story]

Comedian Stephen Fry has said he is “prepared to go to prison” over the “Twitter joke” trial.

Fry was at a benefit gig for a man who is appealing against his conviction for sending a menacing communication. Paul Chambers had tweeted: “Crap! Robin Hood Airport is closed. You’ve got a week… otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!”

Fry argued that Chambers’ tweet was an example of Britain’s tradition of self-deprecating humour and banter.

Chambers’ case has become a cause celebre on Twitter, with hundreds of people reposting his original comments in protest at the conviction.

“This [verdict] must not be allowed to stand in law,” Fry said, adding that he would continue to repeat Chambers’ message and face prison “if that’s what it takes”.

Read More: BBC News

Remember in Friday’s “Rewrite” when we showed you the big lie Sen. Jon Kyl told on the Senate floor about Planned Parenthood? The lie that “well over 90%” of Planned Parenthood’s services go to abortions?

The lie that Sen. Kyl’s staff later said “was not intended to be a factual statement” — a remark Lawrence [O'Donnell] called “one of the strangest clarifications in Senate history?” Well, we weren’t the only ones who took notice. So did Stephen Colbert.

Even though this is intended to be a joke, the CIA’s interest in what it calls “open source intelligence” has been documented (see here and here).

Via the Onion:

After years of secretly monitoring the public, we were astounded so many people would willingly publicize where they live, their religious and political views, an alphabetized list of all their friends, personal emails addresses, phone numbers, hundreds of photos of themselves, and even status updates about what they were doing moment to moment. It is truly a dream come true for the CIA.

Over a two-week period, the three “socialbots” were able to integrate themselves into the group, and gained close to 250 followers between them. They received more than 240 responses to the tweets they sent.

This effort was in fact part of Socialbots 2011, a competition designed to test whether bots can be used to alter the structure of a social network.

Each team had a Twitter account controlled by a socialbot. Like regular human users, the bot could follow other Twitter users and send messages. Bots were rewarded for the number of followers they amassed and the number of responses their tweets generated.

…The military may already be onto the idea. Officials at US Central Command (Centcom), which oversees military activities in the Middle East and central Asia, issued a request last June for an “online persona management service”. The details of the request suggest that the military want to create and control 50 fictitious online identities who appear to be real people from Afghanistan and Iraq. (Full Article)

Though this doesn’t yet represent any particularly unprecedented technology, this could still have repercussions for the future of integrated and interactive gaming formats such as transmedia. (Speaking of “gaming.”)