Twitter Locks WikiLeaks Official Account With 5.4 Million Followers, Days Before Julian Assange's Extradition Hearing 75
Days before Julian Assange's extradition hearings are set to continue, WikiLeaks' journalist Kristin Hrafnsson reports that the official WikiLeaks twitter account has been locked. "All attempts to get it reopened via regular channels have been unsuccessful," writes Hrafnsson in a tweet. "It has been impossible to reach a human at twitter to resolve the issue. Can someone fix this?" RT reports: The @wikileaks account's most recent posts date back to February 9 and concern the dire precedent set by extraditing a publisher to stand trial on espionage charges. Assange's extradition hearing in the UK, which a court ordered to be split into two parts, is set to begin next week, while the second half is scheduled for May. The publisher's lawyers have complained that access to their client is being restricted, and Assange was only recently moved from solitary confinement at Belmarsh prison after his fellow inmates staged a protest. The UN special rapporteur on torture Nils Melzer has accused the UK government of contributing to Assange's "psychological torture" after examining the activist last year. ZeroHedge also points out that this isn't the first time WikiLeaks' account was locked. In 2016, "Twitter lit up in late July with allegations that it tried to suppress news that secret-leaking website Wikileaks exposed thousands of emails obtained from the servers of the Democratic National Committee," reports ZeroHeads, citing The Washington Examiner. "Friday afternoon, users noted, '#DNCLeaks' was trending, with more than 250,000 tweets about it on the platform. By Friday evening, it vanished completely from the site's 'trending' bar for at least 20 minutes. It returned as '#DNCLeak' after users erupted, though it was too late to quell their rage."
For what it's worth, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey at the time denied any attempt to intentionally silence the account.
For what it's worth, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey at the time denied any attempt to intentionally silence the account.
Coincidence (Score:3, Funny)
Gee, it must just be a coincidence.
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Definitely unintentional.
Re: Coincidence (Score:1)
Wikileaks most assuredly is not an organization that attempts to operate on the basis of 'goodwill.' That's the currency of hucksters, politicians and other forms of vermin
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At least Wikileaks follows a model based on open wisdom, despite every huckster out there calling curation the job of the press.
"Goodness alone is never enough. A hard, cold wisdom is required for goodness to accomplish good. Goodness without wisdom always accomplishes evil.”
-Heinlein
Re: Coincidence (Score:2)
You're pretty naive if you think Julian Assange is anything other than a huckster. Alex Jones, David Miscavige, and Kevin Trudeau would fit the definition of publisher or journalist long before Assange would as they've had far less successes at subverting democracy and the law to meet their own ends.
All of the people I've mentioned have plenty of followers, and that doesn't make them any more credible. Suckers aren't hard to find.
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It's not his followers that gives him credibility it's his method.
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In a free society, every organization relies on having good relationships with their suppliers and customers. That's one of the long-reaching implications of the right to free association, and is also the basis for the "corporations are like people" concept in that they can choose to enter a contract, or not.
Twitter chose to exercise their freedom to not associate with WikiLeaks (a choice now reversed [twitter.com]). That's how business works. Of course goodwill is the currency of vermin of all kinds, along with everyone
Re: Coincidence (Score:5, Informative)
Re: Coincidence (Score:2)
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Baseless BS from butthurt Hillbots upset that Wikileaks didn't limit themselves to revealing Republican corruption.
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WikiLeaks is an organization that is quite willing to be a propaganda mouthpiece. Twitter has made efforts before to remove such propaganda from its platform, so this should come as no surprise.
Twitter are the guardians of truth now?
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I'm not suggesting they are, or should be... but they're certainly trying. They're a private company, and they have every right to control what they publish.
Similarly, WikiLeaks is a private organization, and has every right to host their own site, and publish whatever distorted version of the truth they feel like*, and I'll gladly support them for that as I do Twitter.
* I should rant here about the importance of network neutrality as it applies to AS connection peering, because at some point there does nee
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https://youtu.be/xBTQqSNA3oQ [youtu.be]
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
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seconded. I have the death mark in the Twitter system, and @owen_ferguson remains forever locked in their carbonite.
Re: FUCK YOU, JACK. (Score:2)
My Twitter is blocked
https://youtu.be/bwvlbJ0h35A [youtu.be]
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They sure are on par with Twitter.
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Re:Wait, seriously? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Are you still beating your wife every day, twice on Sundays?
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What makes you think she's married?
Re:Wait, seriously? (Score:4, Informative)
We're treating RT and ZeroHedge as legitimate sources now?
"When you cannot attack the message, attack the messenger."
CIA playbook is so transparent.
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So is your Maskirovka [wikipedia.org].
Tell me, what is the weather like in St Petersburg Today [wikipedia.org]?
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Here you go, https://www.accuweather.com/en... [accuweather.com].
I prefer cunts, idiots and arseholes to CIA it is far more accurate. Now the current mess, letting the CIA run the US state department into the sewers and turning the USA's reputation into utter shite, well, yeah you;ll do well.
As for turning Julian Assange into a matryr and expecting any resolution to your problem, well, it is glaringly obvious you will make matters much worse for the USA, really, really, drag it's reputation through the shite, it will take
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Do fuck off with that McCarthyite shitkicking.
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We're treating RT and ZeroHedge as legitimate sources now?
"When you cannot attack the message, attack the messenger."
CIA playbook is so transparent.
RT = Russia Today = the propaganda arm of the Russian government. Sometimes the messenger needs to be attacked.
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We're treating RT and ZeroHedge as legitimate sources now?
I can’t speak to ZeroHedge; but we’ve been using RequestTracker for years without problems.
Re:Wait, seriously? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yep. We're treating RT and Zerohedge as no worse or better than any other news site you may wish to view, read and be entertained by.
What, you think the "officially approved" ones are somehow trustworthy? They just have different propaganda, which is why they've led you to believe that RT and ZH are no good compared to the others.
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Makes ZH look great vs social media brands that have global freedom of speech problems.
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Who do you consider legitimate sources these days? The reason I am asking is that everyone seems to have picked a side to push.
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No one. They are all biased. I read them all and try to figure out what's likely to be the true story. One thing is for sure is when another news site is whining about everyone else carrying "fake news" I start taking everything they say with a larger pinch of salt. But they can't all tell lies all the time otherwise no one would trust them, so somewhere in between all the crap is the truth.
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... yes, they can lie all the time, wtf kind of reasoning is that, anyway?
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More legit than any corporate media.
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Who's we? This is a news aggregation platform. Do not trust the veracity of ANYTHING posted to crowd-based "media" especially fucking Slashdot. Do your own HumInt.
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Thats the freedom of speech and freedom after speech difference on sites like ZH.
The freedom to comment. The freedom to publish. The freedom to link. The freedom of the press and freedom to read.
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Why. Russia didn't do shit in 2016. The whole farce was so that the Democratic Party establishment could distract from HRC's emails, while Swiftboating Hillary's actual Russian problem (Uranium One) onto her opponent.
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There's this guy you might want to add to your list then, Anonymous Coward. Pretty much worthless opinions and doesn't know jack shit about technology or even how the world in general works.
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Funny how every company that does something the Libtards don't like can't just 'do what they want'. You have Democrats banning Chic Fil A from operating in an airport because they can't stand the fact that the people who own it contributed some money to the wrong side.
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If you give money to people so they can use Jesus to abuse other people, that's a double sin and fuck you I'mm'a burn down your restaurant if some dumb deluded christian fuck tries to open one anywhere around me.
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"have a responsibility to treat commercial actors in this space WORSE than .gov actors"
i mean, say that were true (i don't see it personally but whatever). what would i have to do to fulfill this "responsibility"?
Re:Twitter can do what it wants ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Ahh yes, the good ol' defense that the companies who bought the town square don't need to keep it open for the public.
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That's a silly analogy. Twitter wasn't some public open platform run by the government before some corporation came along. A better analogy would be that people complaining that a company bought a building, tore it down, turned it into what looked like a park yet is privately owned, and then people complain that they are bound by the rules of a corporate owner while playing in that park.
Tough. It was a corporate owned messaging platform from the beginning. "big" doesn't mean they need to suddenly follow rul
It's still censorship, Sparky (Score:2)
But it's the gov that told tech companies live on CSPAN that they needed to start censoring the internet, and government-funded think tanks like the Atlantic Council that is tell tech who to censor.
Re: Twitter can do what it wants ... (Score:1)
Yay corporate censorship! Fuck freedom of speech! Corporate rights supercede human rights! Yeehaw!
RT = Russia Today (Score:2)
So Putin's official mouthpiece [wikipedia.org] is calling out to useful idiots [wikipedia.org] to participate in their maskirovka [youtube.com] campaign.
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Thats more free speech support than many other pro gov/mil/political regulation and censorship tech brands are doing..
Welcome to some (Score:1)
Fuck Twitter (Score:2)
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They also locked Project Veritas (Score:1, Insightful)
Twitter == Shit (Score:1)
It's clear, which side Twitter is on. (Score:3)
The side of totalitarian neocon fascists and mass-murderers.
Note it in your mental notebook, and never forget that.
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You're talking about Twitter, right?
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Note it in your mental notebook, and never forget that.
We note a lot of your stupid and ignorant statements in our mental notebooks.
What protest at Belmarsh? (Score:1)
I've neither heard nor read of any protest at Belmarsh for Assange. The google hits seem to come from Russia Today and similar Kremlin organs, and they claim it's a "Yellow Vest" protest. But they're the French protesters ("Gillets Jaune"), not seen this side of the channel. Perhaps the whole story is fake news
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The following comes from The Canary (which I'm not going to link to, as it's an advert infested hole):
"Members of the French Yellow Vest protest movement organised a demonstration outside of Belmarsh prison in solidarity with incarcerated publisher Julian Assange on 25 January. Two coaches with a hundred people from different French cities departed from Paris at 8pm on Friday evening and arrived the next morning in Woolwich, South East London."
I can't find any mainstream news organisation reporting regardin