That famous love-in between Hillary Clinton’s state department and the world’s favourite micro-blogging service must be wearing a bit thin this weekend.
As other internet services have acted to cut Wikileaks off over its massive dump of US diplomatic cables, Twitter’s willingness to carry the renegade site’s messages has become increasingly noteworthy.
In fact, as it becomes harder to find Wikileaks domains that are still accessible, Twitter has become the most reliable platform for it to get its message out to the world.
This defiant tweet on Saturday afternoon, tapping the Twitter search service, said it all:
WikiLeaks strikes back. Cut us down and the stronger we become: http://twitter.com/search?q=imwikileaks
“It’s remarkable that Twitter hasn’t done anything to thwart their messages,” says Evgeny Morozov, an expert on the struggle between repressive governments and dissidents for control of the internet.
It would be easy enough for Twitter to find an excuse to act – after all, everyone else seems to have done so. PayPal, justifying its decision to block payments to Wikileaks, quoted its terms of service, which say that it “cannot be used for any activities that encourage, promote facilitate or instruct others to engage in illegal activity.” That sounds very similar to Twitter’s own terms of service:
You may not use our service for any unlawful purposes or for promotion of illegal activities.
As Wikileaks becomes increasingly isolated on the Web, Twitter’s response will become increasingly significant.
