Twitter Censoring News About Leaks That Corporations Don’t Want You to See

Twitter deleted tweets over the weekend that linked to articles about TV shows that were leaked online. And then Twitter deleted people’s tweets about the deletions.

TorrentFreak, a website that reports news on piracy issues, published a story on April 8 about episodes of several TV shows that had leaked online before they aired. TorrentFreak called the leak “one of the largest breaches ever.”

The TorrentFreak story didn’t link to pirate sites that are hosting the leaked content, but that didn’t stop Twitter from deleting tweets that linked to the TorrentFreak story. Even the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) had their tweet deleted.

Twitter even deleted tweets linking to a follow-up story by TorrentFreak from April 11.

This is Kafka-esque: I posted yesterday about Twitter removing a tweet from TorrrentFreak because it contained a link to an article about pirated copies of Starz shows appearing online (with no links to said content). Twitter has now removed my tweet linking to that story pic.twitter.com/pKF4VCRSit

— Mathew Ingram (@mathewi) April 14, 2019

Starz made a statement to IndieWire apologizing for the takedowns that may have “inadvertently” targeted the wrong content.

 

 

Image adapted by: “Blue Sky Twitter” by mkhmarketing is licensed under CC BY 2.0