Country-by-Country Twitter view
Rima Tanash, Jack Reed & Tanmay Thakur
Background
On January 27, 2012, Twitter announced their new “Country-Withheld Content” policy in which Twitter will withhold tweets rather than deleting them in accordance with the policy of the country from which the tweet originated. Twitter currently has the capability to block a tweet from one country while leaving it visible to others [5].
Scope
In this Project, our goal is to examine a test Twitter account to see if the home news feed displays the same tweets when viewed from different counties. In this way, we can examine to what extent content is being withheld in these countries.
Steps
Proposed steps to tackle this problem:
1) Identify countries of interest to based on the availability of PlanetLab or Tor exit nodes
Current PlanetLabs: Country
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem: Israel/Palestine
Tel Aviv Yaffo College: Israel/Palestine
Jordan University of Science and Technology: Jordan
American University in Cairo: Egypt
American University of Beirut: Lebanon
PlanetLab: India, UK
2) Create a PlanetLab account for our test
3) Create a test Twitter account and follow chatty users from target countries
4) Use some python-twitter wrapper around Twitter API (for example, https://github.com/bear/python-twitter) to write a program to fetch most recent posted public Twitter statuses of the targeted users using their Twitter “name” or “id”
5) Run the program from different parts of the world preferably using PlanetLab to fetch news feed periodically and as often as allowed by Twitter
6) Compare the results to see if there are any mismatches
Project Deliverables
1) Examine current Twitter “Country-Withheld Content” policy to understand how it works
2) Examine any available related work in the literature
3) Write a program that fetches public tweets
4) Compare output and summarize results using tables or graphs
5) Produce final written report and references
References:
[1] http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2011/12/19/saudi-prince-deal-for-twitter-is-a-secondary/
[2] http://venturebeat.com/2012/11/05/new-twitter-policy-for-offending-tweets-withhold-instead-of-remove/
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cease-and-desist
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilling_Effects
[5] https://blog.twitter.com/2012/tweets-still-must-flow
[6] http://www.freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-net/2012/jordan
[7] http://www.policymic.com/articles/13746/sopa-arab-style-jordan-websites-go-dark-to-protest-internet-censorship-bill
[8] http://www.freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-net/2012/bahrain
[9] http://www.chillingeffects.org/weather.cgi?WeatherID=784
[10] http://surveillance.rsf.org/en/bahrain/