How Twitter Is Selling Out To The Likes Of Malema

In November 2010, the President of the African National Congress Youth League (ANCYL), Julius Malema, threatened to shut down Twitter after being told of a surge in fraudulent accounts/tweeps impersonating him.


"The ANC YL has in more than one occasion reported these impersonators and hackers, yet no action has been taken against them by the twitter administrators. We will now approach the relevant authorities to report these hackers and call for the closer of twitter if its administrators are not able to administer reports for violation of basic human rights and integrity," the league said in a statement.



“An amusingly misguided bunch” I thought. The rest of South Africa (SA) shared the same sentiment. Not that it was far from truth because it’s highly unlikely that they foresaw the fall of internet “freedom of speech”. Some gut-busting slurs such as the comments posted after the following Daily Maverick article followed.


Just over a year later (last week Thursday), Twitter announced their readiness to open gates for such horse feathers. The cool Twitter, that I thought could never be touched by the man, was now doing a strip-tease for repressive governments. Things get dodgier if you have to consider the current American internet policing battles but I prefer to keep that can closed in this post.


In their blog Twitter announced last week that it’s ready to selectively block tweets in specific countries. How would this work?


If in SA a tweet or account has been withheld and you try to view it, you’ll get an alert box that says something like “Tweet withheld” or “@peterpeele withheld” in place of the affected tweet or account.


Twitter explains that this ability is necessary for them to expand around the world - "If we receive a valid and properly scoped request from an authorized entity, it may be necessary to reactively withhold access to certain content in a particular country from time to time,".


Even though they claim that not to be the case, the power that we attributed to Twitter at the start of the Libyan Revolution last year will now be compromised. You can read the CEO's defense here if you’re interested but to me it’s all ‘suspect’ and we should consider taking our laughs at the ANCYL back. To a certain degree, they can do it!