News
Nigeria Bans Twitter after its President’s Tweet Deleted
The Nigerian government announced on Friday it was suspending Twitter’s operations after it deleted a post by the country’s president. Nigeria’s mobile phone networks blocked access after being ordered to do so, but some users are getting around the Twitter ban by using VPN’s.
Nigeria’s Information Minister has warned that the government will prosecute anyone found to have breached the country’s ban on Twitter. He also ordered the country’s broadcast commission to compel all so-called over-the-top media services and social-media operations in Nigeria to apply for permits to operate.
His government said on Saturday the presidents tweet’s removal was “disappointing”, but not the only reason for the Twitter ban.
“There has been a litany of problems with the social media platform in Nigeria, where misinformation and fake news spread through it have had real world violent consequences,” the government Information Minister said.
Twitter on Friday said the announcement of the ban by Information Minister Lai Mohammed was “deeply concerning”.
Twitter being used to undermine “Nigeria’s corporate existence”
In a statement, Justice Minister Abubakar Malami said he had “directed for immediate prosecution of offenders of the Federal Government ban on Twitter operations in Nigeria”, telling the public prosecutor to “swing into action”.
The message was targeted at both corporations and individuals, the minister’s spokesperson Umar Gwandu told the BBC.The government of Nigeria alleges that Twitter was being used to undermine “Nigeria’s corporate existence”.
The platform was allowing “the spread of religious, racist, xenophobic and false messages” that “could tear some countries apart”, a spokesperson said.
The national broadcasting regulator, NBC, had been told to begin “licensing all internet streaming services and social media operations in Nigeria”, a government statement said.
Earlier, the professional body of Nigerian mobile phone operators – known as Alton – confirmed they had been told to stop people getting on to Twitter. The group said its members had complied with the government order due to “national interest provisions” in Nigerian telecoms law and licensing terms.
Which Countries Censor Twitter?
While most countries don’t bother with trying to influence any social media to remove or censor content, there are some who do. Some of the countries on the list were to be expected, as repression of journalism and free speech are commonplace in those regions of the world. Others have only certain issues with how social media is operated, and finally, some are countries that officially champion free speech as a value, but the government is sometimes at odds with certain movements or statements that were somehow deemed to be derogatory, inflammatory, or harmful in some other way.
1. Twitter censorship in China
Although Twitter is banned in China, with the favor of the government being with the countries own Sina Weibo microblogging platform, Twitter still reports between 10 and 35 million users coming from the PRC. Users are unable to access the website or the app using local IP addresses and are forced to use VPN services to even search tweets or any content from the platform.
Users in the PRC use professional VPN services like Le VPN, not only to access the social media but as to stay anonymous and mask their IP address.
2. Twitter censorship in North Korea
Although any access to Twitter in North Korea is punishable by law since 2016, this hasn’t resulted in a significant drop in the global number of users as there were few with internet access in the hermit nation in the first place. Since the ban, even foreigners with special permits are not allowed to access Twitter from the country and would be unable to do so from the few access points available. Maybe you shouldn’t risk it?
While there is a possibility to use a VPN to circumvent these restrictions, any travelers to N. Korea are not advised to do so as most internet access points are heavily monitored and using a VPN alone is punishable by law.
3. Twitter censorship in Russia
While Russia is generally known to have a very low tolerance level for any media coverage of the opposition, the country has avoided banning or censoring Twitter for the most part. The biggest incident came in the first half of 2014 with Russia demanding Twitter to ban a pro-Ukrainian account or to make it invisible for Russian users. This has later grown to multiple accounts or individual tweets that were deemed to break Russian law. Any user in Russia who wanted to access that Twitter account needed to use a VPN from any other country.
Finally, Twitter banned a hacking collective in July of the same year for leaking several documents of the Kremlin to the media, which breached both the Russian law and Twitter’s own terms of service.
People traveling to Russia should consider that due to Russia banning many online services and pages, some apps might be unavailable using a Russian ISP (internet service provider), especially for iOS. Because of this, travelers should use the best VPN for iPhone or Android that they can find, and always keep the app ON when connecting to a local WiFi.
4. Twitter censorship in Iran
While most people believe that North Korea bans most websites through their ISP, this title actually goes to Iran, which has been increasing the number of sites blocked steadily since 2009. Twitter was banned in 2009 following protests that were organized through this platform, and the new government never lifted the ban. Users that are living in, or traveling to Iran, are highly recommended to use a VPN, as the internet service providers (ISP) in this country are suspected of monitoring any communication and deny access to most popular global platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, or Instagram.
Users in Iran need to use VPN to both access the internet freely and to mask their IP location, staying anonymous and safe.
5. Twitter censorship in Pakistan
While Pakistan allows users inside the country to access Twitter freely, they have demanded that all kinds of words, phrases, and even entire accounts be blocked or removed due to them being ‘’blasphemous”. This has mostly focused on domestic topics and removal of any anti-Islamic notions from the platform but has strangely also impacted atheist and Wiccan accounts.
Any user in Pakistan is strongly advised always to use a VPN and stay anonymous while tweeting, as multiple issues could be deemed blasphemous and would result in legal punishment.
6. Twitter censorship in India
While India doesn’t usually meddle with censorship of any social media, they have requested for the spoof accounts of the Prime Minister of India to be deleted in 2012, following the violence in Assam. Several accounts impersonating the PMs official account, or any account impersonating the then PM Manmohan Singh, were removed from the platform.
7. Twitter censorship in Egypt
There is currently no part of Twitter that is being banned or censored in Egypt, which is a stark difference with the situation prior, and especially during the Arab Spring in Egypt, and the massive protests that have occurred against the then president Hosni Mubarak, who was by that moment ruling the country for thirty years. Twitter became inaccessible through local ISP providers in January 25th, 2011, with many users switching to VPN to live stream and tweet what is on the ground. Just two days later the domestic ISPs disabled all internet access to and from the country, leaving all Egyptians without internet. To combat this, Twitter joined with Google and SayNow to allow Egyptian users to send in their tweets via voicemail and to listen to comments in the same way.
Once the protests succeeded and the government was changed, all restrictions on the internet in this nation were removed. Users in the country are still advised to use a VPN, but more for personal reasons such as identity security and cybersecurity, not government oppression.
8. Twitter censorship in Venezuela
Although the service itself was still active, during the Venezuelan Riots in 2014, all images from the country were blocked, including those on Twitter. This was to prevent the current government narrative that there was only a handful of protestors from collapsing. As Twitter gave the users in Venezuela an option to work around this issue by using phone messages, freedom of expression in the country was preserved, and it was shown that most of the country was in disarray.
9. Twitter censorship in South Korea
While the government of South Korea isn’t known for banning and blocking websites, there are currently about 65 URLs that are inaccessible while using a South Korean IP address, one of which is the official Twitter account of North Korea with the handle @uriminzok, which roughly translates to ‘’our people” in Korean. As S. Korea deemed that most of which can be seen on the twitter account profile were propaganda, the country banned the access to both Korean and English versions of the profile.
Currently, you need to use a VPN with a server outside of South Korea to visit the Twitter of their northern neighbors, who’s twitter page in English has gained more than 50 thousand followers so far.
10. Twitter censorship in France
In January of 2013, a series of anti-Semitic posts were made on Twitter, all in French. Although these posts were promptly deleted from Twitter as they violate the Terms of Service, the Union of Jewish Students of France, UEJF (French: Union des étudiants Juifs de France), has filed a lawsuit. The goal was to force Twitter to disclose the user information of the users to the general public as the content was determined to be hate speech by the French law. For any non-compliance the company would be charged around $1300 each day, which was finally impossible to enforce, as Twitter has no offices or personnel in the Republic.
11. Twitter censorship in the United States of America
Last but not least, the base country of Twitter, the good ol’ land of the free and the home of the brave. There are only a few instances of the federal government ever directly influencing Twitter in order to ban or delete content. The company itself is biased slightly to Californian standards when it comes to politics, and has been found to be more lenient to the representatives of the policies they support, with regular bans for accounts that have been deemed to spread hate by Twitter alone.
The only direct ruling from the Federal Court was that the President, Donald Trump, isn’t able to block anyone from his personal twitter handle, although he is able to mute people and is under the same protection from harassment like any other user.
Source: BBC, Le-VPN
News
Google’s Search Dominance Is Unwinding, But Still Accounting 48% Search Revenue
Google is so closely associated with its key product that its name is a verb that signifies “search.” However, Google’s dominance in that sector is dwindling.
According to eMarketer, Google will lose control of the US search industry for the first time in decades next year.
Google will remain the dominant search player, accounting for 48% of American search advertising revenue. And, remarkably, Google is still increasing its sales in the field, despite being the dominating player in search since the early days of the George W. Bush administration. However, Amazon is growing at a quicker rate.
Google’s Search Dominance Is Unwinding
Amazon will hold over a quarter of US search ad dollars next year, rising to 27% by 2026, while Google will fall even more, according to eMarketer.
The Wall Street Journal was first to report on the forecast.
Lest you think you’ll have to switch to Bing or Yahoo, this isn’t the end of Google or anything really near.
Google is the fourth-most valued public firm in the world. Its market worth is $2.1 trillion, trailing just Apple, Microsoft, and the AI chip darling Nvidia. It also maintains its dominance in other industries, such as display advertisements, where it dominates alongside Facebook’s parent firm Meta, and video ads on YouTube.
To put those “other” firms in context, each is worth more than Delta Air Lines’ total market value. So, yeah, Google is not going anywhere.
Nonetheless, Google faces numerous dangers to its operations, particularly from antitrust regulators.
On Monday, a federal judge in San Francisco ruled that Google must open up its Google Play Store to competitors, dealing a significant blow to the firm in its long-running battle with Fortnite creator Epic Games. Google announced that it would appeal the verdict.
In August, a federal judge ruled that Google has an illegal monopoly on search. That verdict could lead to the dissolution of the company’s search operation. Another antitrust lawsuit filed last month accuses Google of abusing its dominance in the online advertising business.
Meanwhile, European regulators have compelled Google to follow tough new standards, which have resulted in multiple $1 billion-plus fines.

Pixa Bay
Google’s Search Dominance Is Unwinding
On top of that, the marketplace is becoming more difficult on its own.
TikTok, the fastest-growing social network, is expanding into the search market. And Amazon has accomplished something few other digital titans have done to date: it has established a habit.
When you want to buy anything, you usually go to Amazon, not Google. Amazon then buys adverts to push companies’ products to the top of your search results, increasing sales and earning Amazon a greater portion of the revenue. According to eMarketer, it is expected to generate $27.8 billion in search revenue in the United States next year, trailing only Google’s $62.9 billion total.
And then there’s AI, the technology that (supposedly) will change everything.
Why search in stilted language for “kendall jenner why bad bunny breakup” or “police moving violation driver rights no stop sign” when you can just ask OpenAI’s ChatGPT, “What’s going on with Kendall Jenner and Bad Bunny?” in “I need help fighting a moving violation involving a stop sign that wasn’t visible.” Google is working on exactly this technology with its Gemini product, but its success is far from guaranteed, especially with Apple collaborating with OpenAI and other businesses rapidly joining the market.
A Google spokeswoman referred to a blog post from last week in which the company unveiled ads in its AI overviews (the AI-generated text that appears at the top of search results). It’s Google’s way of expressing its ability to profit on a changing marketplace while retaining its business, even as its consumers steadily transition to ask-and-answer AI and away from search.

Google has long used a single catchphrase to defend itself against opponents who claim it is a monopoly abusing its power: competition is only a click away. Until recently, that seemed comically obtuse. Really? We are going to switch to Bing? Or Duck Duck Go? Give me a break.
But today, it feels more like reality.
Google is in no danger of disappearing. However, every highly dominating company faces some type of reckoning over time. GE, a Dow mainstay for more than a century, was broken up last year and is now a shell of its previous dominance. Sears declared bankruptcy in 2022 and is virtually out of business. US Steel, long the foundation of American manufacturing, is attempting to sell itself to a Japanese corporation.
SOURCE | CNN
News
2024 | Supreme Court Won’t Hear Appeal From Elon Musk’s X Platform Over Warrant In Trump Case
Washington — Trump Media, The Supreme Court announced Monday that it will not hear an appeal from social media platform X about a search warrant acquired by prosecutors in the election meddling case against former President Donald Trump.
The justices did not explain their rationale, and there were no recorded dissents.
The firm, which was known as Twitter before being purchased by billionaire Elon Musk, claims a nondisclosure order that prevented it from informing Trump about the warrant obtained by special counsel Jack Smith’s team violated its First Amendment rights.
The business also claims Trump should have had an opportunity to exercise executive privilege. If not reined in, the government may employ similar tactics to intercept additional privileged communications, their lawyers contended.
Supreme Court Won’t Hear Appeal From Elon Musk’s X Platform Over Warrant In Trump Case
Two neutral electronic privacy groups also joined in, urging the high court to hear the case on First Amendment grounds.
Prosecutors, however, claim that the corporation never shown that Trump utilized the account for official purposes, therefore executive privilege is not a problem. A lower court also determined that informing Trump could have compromised the current probe.

Trump utilized his Twitter account in the weeks preceding up to his supporters’ attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, to spread false assertions about the election, which prosecutors claim were intended to create doubt in the democratic process.
The indictment describes how Trump used his Twitter account to encourage his followers to travel to Washington on Jan. 6, pressuring Vice President Mike Pence to reject the certification, and falsely claiming that the Capitol crowd, which battered police officers and destroyed glass, was peaceful.
Supreme Court Won’t Hear Appeal From Elon Musk’s X Platform Over Warrant In Trump Case
That case is now moving forward following the Supreme Court’s verdict in July, which granted Trump full immunity from criminal prosecution as a former president.
The warrant arrived at Twitter amid quick changes implemented by Musk, who bought the company in 2022 and has since cut off most of its workforce, including those dedicated to combating disinformation and hate speech.
SOURCE | AP
News
The Supreme Court Turns Down Biden’s Government Appeal in a Texas Emergency Abortion Matter.
(VOR News) – A ruling that prohibits emergency abortions that contravene the Supreme Court law in the state of Texas, which has one of the most stringent abortion restrictions in the country, has been upheld by the Supreme Court of the United States. The United States Supreme Court upheld this decision.
The justices did not provide any specifics regarding the underlying reasons for their decision to uphold an order from a lower court that declared hospitals cannot be legally obligated to administer abortions if doing so would violate the law in the state of Texas.
Institutions are not required to perform abortions, as stipulated in the decree. The common populace did not investigate any opposing viewpoints. The decision was made just weeks before a presidential election that brought abortion to the forefront of the political agenda.
This decision follows the 2022 Supreme Court ruling that ended abortion nationwide.
In response to a request from the administration of Vice President Joe Biden to overturn the lower court’s decision, the justices expressed their disapproval.
The government contends that hospitals are obligated to perform abortions in compliance with federal legislation when the health or life of an expectant patient is in an exceedingly precarious condition.
This is the case in regions where the procedure is prohibited. The difficulty hospitals in Texas and other states are experiencing in determining whether or not routine care could be in violation of stringent state laws that prohibit abortion has resulted in an increase in the number of complaints concerning pregnant women who are experiencing medical distress being turned away from emergency rooms.
The administration cited the Supreme Court’s ruling in a case that bore a striking resemblance to the one that was presented to it in Idaho at the beginning of the year. The justices took a limited decision in that case to allow the continuation of emergency abortions without interruption while a lawsuit was still being heard.
In contrast, Texas has been a vocal proponent of the injunction’s continued enforcement. Texas has argued that its circumstances are distinct from those of Idaho, as the state does have an exemption for situations that pose a significant hazard to the health of an expectant patient.
According to the state, the discrepancy is the result of this exemption. The state of Idaho had a provision that safeguarded a woman’s life when the issue was first broached; however, it did not include protection for her health.
Certified medical practitioners are not obligated to wait until a woman’s life is in imminent peril before they are legally permitted to perform an abortion, as determined by the state supreme court.
The state of Texas highlighted this to the Supreme Court.
Nevertheless, medical professionals have criticized the Texas statute as being perilously ambiguous, and a medical board has declined to provide a list of all the disorders that are eligible for an exception. Furthermore, the statute has been criticized for its hazardous ambiguity.
For an extended period, termination of pregnancies has been a standard procedure in medical treatment for individuals who have been experiencing significant issues. It is implemented in this manner to prevent catastrophic outcomes, such as sepsis, organ failure, and other severe scenarios.
Nevertheless, medical professionals and hospitals in Texas and other states with strict abortion laws have noted that it is uncertain whether or not these terminations could be in violation of abortion prohibitions that include the possibility of a prison sentence. This is the case in regions where abortion prohibitions are exceedingly restrictive.
Following the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, which resulted in restrictions on the rights of women to have abortions in several Republican-ruled states, the Texas case was revisited in 2022.
As per the orders that were disclosed by the administration of Vice President Joe Biden, hospitals are still required to provide abortions in cases that are classified as dire emergency.
As stipulated in a piece of health care legislation, the majority of hospitals are obligated to provide medical assistance to patients who are experiencing medical distress. This is in accordance with the law.
The state of Texas maintained that hospitals should not be obligated to provide abortions throughout the litigation, as doing so would violate the state’s constitutional prohibition on abortions. In its January judgment, the 5th United States Circuit Court of Appeals concurred with the state and acknowledged that the administration had exceeded its authority.
SOURCE: AP
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