Congress wants Twitter to censor tweets from the Taliban
Here goes Joe Lieberman again trying to get the Internet to bend to his perception of what is allowable and what isn’t.
This time he is behind an initiative to force Twitter into censoring any Taliban tweets that should happen to show up on the service. His reasoning apparently is to “eliminate violent Islamist extremism propaganda” that is proliferating on the social media site.
Of course he seems to ignore the fact that unless you are silly enough to try and suck back the complete public timeline of tweets you would need to be following the Taliban related accounted to be able to see their offensive messages.
According to the report in the Telegraph an aide to Lieberman has confirmed that he along with a group of other senators are asking Twitter to close down some specific Taliban related accounts.
Leslie Phillips, a spokesman for the senate homeland security committee, said:
“Senator Lieberman’s efforts to eliminate violent Islamist extremism propaganda from the internet and social media has been a campaign of persuasion.
“He has written letters, for example to Google seeking the company to enforce more strongly its terms of service, which ban the sort of thing that we see from violent Islamist extremists.
“Google responded positively to the Senator’s letter.”
Apparently Twitter is resisting any pressure to close the accounts using the argument the Taliban is not considered to be a terrorist group by the US government and as such they do not see any reason to shut the accounts down.
via All Twitter
