Someone poke Syria
News reports* indicate that Syria is now blocking Facebook, alleging Israeli spies were infiltrating Syrian social networks. One can doubt that given some of the other sites on Syria's blocked list—YouTube, Blogspot, Hotmail, Skype and—wait for it—Amazon.
But not LibraryThing! Syria bans sites, China bans sites. Heck the UAE just banned Twitter!** But we never get banned, by those guys or anyone else; our competitors don't get banned either. I'm almost sorry about it. YouTube might someday bring down a government, but people talking about books does it all the time.
*See: SeattlePI, Washington Post/Reuters, Mashable, Fox/AP, Jerusalem Post.
**As a certified member of the Web/Lib 2.0 set I'm supposed to think Twitter is a serious thing. I don't. I don't fall for the argument that only books matter, or that blogs are giving us the attention spans and intellectual perspicacity of squirrels. And I don't think social networking is vain shadow of real-life connection. But there is some lower limit to the length of an idea and the depth of a connection—and Twitter is it!
But not LibraryThing! Syria bans sites, China bans sites. Heck the UAE just banned Twitter!** But we never get banned, by those guys or anyone else; our competitors don't get banned either. I'm almost sorry about it. YouTube might someday bring down a government, but people talking about books does it all the time.
*See: SeattlePI, Washington Post/Reuters, Mashable, Fox/AP, Jerusalem Post.
**As a certified member of the Web/Lib 2.0 set I'm supposed to think Twitter is a serious thing. I don't. I don't fall for the argument that only books matter, or that blogs are giving us the attention spans and intellectual perspicacity of squirrels. And I don't think social networking is vain shadow of real-life connection. But there is some lower limit to the length of an idea and the depth of a connection—and Twitter is it!
Labels: censorship, syria
posted by Tim at 6:00 PM
4 Comments:
I'm surprised they didn't say that it was because of productivity concerns. After all that's why the Canadian federal government blocked Facebook.
This comment has been removed by the author.
I don't think you can block an entire nation from accessing a website due to productivity . . . this is wide-scale censorship, not private-network "concerns".
Of course they shouldn't have blocked it but if they are going to they might as well come up with a better excuse then the Israelis will know who added the top friend's application. It's killing our productivity or strangling the network at least sounds better even though it is still BS.
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