Twitter blocked the official account of the Hungarian government without explanation, state secretary for international communications and relations Zoltán Kovács told Facebook on Wednesday. “This is rather intriguing given the European Commission is publishing its first report on the rule of law on Wednesday,” Kovács wrote. “It seems that Brave New World has finally arrived,” he added. According to him, ...
By Dr. Azadeh Abbaszadeh* TEHRAN – Let’s assume that you are standing inside the elevator of a 100-floor tower all day and all night long, for 24 hours, and your home is on the 70th floor; after a while, you notice that everyone who enters the elevator gets off at their floor and you are just an onlooker. Then, as ...
Facebook is no longer satisfied with users and groups, and has begun to colonize much of our day to day lives: what can one do to replace the platform, and will abdicating ultimately help to overcome the company’s ultra-liberal agenda? Earlier we wrote about the Turkish precedent in an attempt to take control of popular social networks, and about the ...
Attacks against Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on various social media outlets have once again raised questions about the totalitarian nature of Twitter, Youtube and Facebook around the world. After Erdogan’s family (his daughter and son-in-law) received abusive tweets about the birth of the fourth child in their family, the Turkish president spoke out against social media and declared that ...
Around six years ago, in October 2013, I was invited to deliver a speech at an international conference hosted by ICRC and Jamia Millia Islamia University in New Delhi. My speech was on “The Pros and Cons of Social Media”. At that time, I warned about the possibility of governments misusing social media resources to spread their influence, point out ...
A recent story by the Washington Post revealed that Facebook’s algorithms had censored the United States’ Declaration of Independence, flagging it for alleged “hate speech”. The post was removed from the social network because it contained the phrase “merciless Indian Savages.” The post was later restored, but not before the incident began to be discussed around the world. There were ...