To Battle Cartels, Mexico Weighs Twitter Crackdown

    Add new comment

    Date: 
    15 April 2010

    Mexican drug cartels appear to have adopted a new technique to avoid military raids and police checkpoints: using Facebook and Twitter. And so now the Mexican government is trying to crack down ... on the use of Facebook and Twitter.

    Facebook has been on the radar of government officials who believe that it has been used to facilitate the abduction of the relatives of powerful businessmen and politicians, with kidnappers allegedly using the social-networking site to discover the identities of a high-profile person's family members. Meanwhile, authorities, already peeved that ordinary citizens have been using Twitter to alert one another to the locations of Breathalyzer checkpoints via @antiaa_df, are now furious that drug dealers are using Twitter accounts to circumvent dragnets and communicate with one another.