Twitter's Censors Provoke Backlash

Proponents of online privacy and freedom of expression now have a new problem to worry about. On Thursday, Twitter announced that it was giving itself the ability to "withhold content from users in a specific country," while still making that content available to users in other countries.

In a posting on the company blog entitled "Tweets still must flow," the company said that it hasn't yet used this ability, but, "if and when we are required to withhold a Tweet," it will make an effort to inform the user and mark when and why the content has been withheld.

Every evening across China, the state broadcaster's flagship news program enters hundreds of millions of homes. And night after night, TV screens show dull reports of Communist Party meetings or leaders on inspection tours full of beaming farmers and clapping workers.

The morning's newspapers carry similar fare, so don't bother searching for satire or political cartoons: There aren't any. But go online, and it's a different story.

Buying ads on Twitter is about to get easier for small businesses as the online messaging service adds a key piece to its moneymaking model.

Twitter is unveiling a long-awaited automated system that will enable advertisers to manage their marketing campaigns and budgets without having to deal with sales representatives.

Before Twitter opens the system to all comers later this year, the self-service approach announced Thursday will only be available to advertisers who accept or use American Express cards

To get the ball rolling, American Express Co.

World-famous microblogging service Twitter has changed its policies and will "reactively withhold" (read: censor) tweets deemed illegal or harmful in countries with laws concerning such things.
On Thursday, the policy change was announced in the official Twitter blog, where it said:

Speaking at the AllThingsD conference today, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo showed off how Twitter's new photo-sharing feature will work. The new feature, which will compete with third-party solutions such as TwitPic and yfrog, will let Twitter users share images directly in their timeline. Twitter says that the service will be rolled out over the next few weeks to the desktop version of Twitter followed later by a mobile client for most smartphone platforms.

Government officials continue to put pressure on U.S. technology companies to stop censorship in China. Sen.

Internet activists and digital entrepreneurs warned Wednesday that if global leaders attempt to limit access to the Web, their restrictions will be bypassed and they will become irrelevant.

The stark message adds to growing resistance -- from big name companies like Google and Twitter to anonymous Internet vigilantes who have attacked government censorship networks -- against creeping laws that might one day restrict services many users now take for granted.

The leaders of the Group of Eight most powerful countries begin meeting in France on Thursday to discuss issues of global concern

The "switching on" of specific genes in the human genome is what makes each human tissue and each human being unique. A new study found that many gene expression changes that occur during fetal development are reversed immediately after birth. Reversals of fetal expression changes are also seen again much later in life during normal aging of the brain. Additionally, the team observed the reversal of fetal expression changes in Alzheimer's disease findings reported in other studies.