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Twitter Blocked in Egypt As Protests Turn Violent
By: mashable.comPosted On: 01/28/2011 12:13 P
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Instead of confirming or denying reports of Twitter being blocked in Egypt, Twitter launched a new @TwitterGlobalPR account this afternoon that points to HerdictWeb, a website by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University that crowdsources reports of inaccessible webpages.
Instead of confirming or denying reports of Twitter being blocked in Egypt, Twitter launched a new @TwitterGlobalPR account this afternoon that points to HerdictWeb, a website by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University that crowdsources reports of inaccessible webpages.
“We’re not the experts on how Twitter is being used in highly developing situations 1000s of miles from our comfortable HQ in SF,” the company tweeted. “The experts are those using Twitter on the ground and those coordinating with them around the world.”
So far about 10 of those people have submitted reports of Twitter being down to HerdictWeb. Mark Belinsky, the co-director of the nonprofit Digital Democracy, told CNET that it’s still hard to tell whether the site’s inaccessibility is due to an overload of traffic or government action.
As anti-government protesters and police clash in Cairo today, reports indicate that the Egyptian government is making an effort to censor Twitter and other websites.
As with the protests in Tunisia throughout the last month (which at least partially inspired the Egyptian uprising), the protest in Cairo was organized using Facebook. The Christian Science Monitor reports that more than 90,000 people signed up on a Facebook Page for the protests in the past week, though the turnout appears to be much smaller than that.
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