Bahrain, Tunisia Filtering Individual Twitter Pages

By: Jillian C. York on 4 January 2010
Posted in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Middle East and North Africa (MENA), Social filtering

Over the past few weeks, reports have trickled in to Herdict and via Twitter, alerting us of the filtering of individual Twitter pages in Tunisia and Bahrain (as well as, possibly, China). In Tunisia, the accounts of exiled activist Sami Ben Gharbia (@ifikra), engineer @Ma7moud, and popular independent news source Nawaat (@nawaat) have been confirmed inaccessible, while in Bahrain @FreeBahrain was allegedly blocked on New Year's Day, but has since become accessible.

Twitter is no stranger to being blocked: Both China and Iran have blocked the social networking/microblogging site in the past, and Saudi Arabia reportedly blocked two individual Twitter users' pages in mid-2009. What is particularly interesting is that the governments of Tunisia and Bahrain have now demonstrated capability to block individual Twitter pages, thus silencing certain voices while still keeping a major communication platform open. Only time will tell if this is to become a trend globally.