FT columnist John Gapper is in Davos this week and reports on a really cool decision by Twitter's leadership to take a different tack in engaging censorship globally. Rather than negotiate with dictators, Twitter's engineers are working to make it easier for people in the affected regions to bypass the censorship, making its products valuable even without official sanction.
{Twitter CEO and Co-Founder Evan] Williams said Twitter had an advantage in evading government censors through operating as a network of internet and mobile applications, rather than as a single website. “Twitter is a network that is accessed in thousands of ways.”
I did notice in China that Facebook was accessible via Blackberry but not on regular computers. The announcement, a throwaway line in a news conference by social networking executives, didn't seem to get big play elsewhere and Williams was light on details of exactly what they are doing. Still, kudos to Gapper for finding the news amidst the canned statements.
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