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Article

14 Jun 2012

Author:
Rebecca MacKinnon, fellow at New America Foundation & founder of Global Voices, in Foreign Policy [USA]

Ruling Facebookistan

...[On] June 1, Ho Tsung-hsun was suddenly shut out of his Facebook account...Ho [is] a veteran activist and citizen journalist on environmental and social issues in Taiwan...Company executives insist that the suspensions [in Taiwan & Hong Kong] were the result of internal computer and staff errors that had nothing to do with Chinese or Taiwanese politics...In 2010 the Open Net Initiative...published a report...documenting account deactivations and deletion of activists' postings across...social media services...Palestinian activist Ramzi Jaber...[created] onlinecensorship.org, through which users of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube [part of Google], Flickr [part of Yahoo] and Google Plus can report on incidents of deletion and deactivation...[He says,] "Social media has tremendous power for people to assert their voice, especially those who have been clamped down...This is a way of making sure that these networks, these private intermediaries, are held accountable and free speech is not suppressed."