Twitter shuts down pghcopmovements account in midst of G-20 protests

Show the public how it is an arm of us imperialism

Unfortunately you have no access to your contacts at this time was the blurb at the top of page. Anybody else have this happen?

Twitter is a for-profit corporation, not a public service. If you want freely supported access, stick with indymedia & other outlets.

and all of the global justice activists that run to youtube, flickr, etc make me want to hurl

we need a non-corporate independent media. oh, yeah, we have indymedia. but people don't think twice about using google email and other corporate sites for everything. google reads your email and serves you ads based on what you have typed. all of these companies readily sell you out to government spooks, literally as they get paid for it. and people just don't seem to care. even supposed revolutionary types. yikes

while the folks at the G20 are doing a great job keeping up with covering events as they happen, it's kind of sickening that the tools they are using are extensions of online corporate monsters (twitter, youtube, et al)

we can't have a revolution without revolutionary media. the revolution will not be googlized

It is true that Twitter is a corporate for profit media social networking outlet and that you are better off with Indymedia if you do not want to get censored, like what happened here. But the problem is that alot more people are getting their information in society from Twitter than Indymedia. The same goes for Facebook, myspace, and alot of other mainstream social networking outlets and media sources. One of the reason that the system has control of the info. flow in society is because society turns to the system for the information. People need to free their minds and seek the truth on their own terms before the truth is revealed to them. People need to wake up and realize that just because people can blog on twitter or wherever, that does not necessarly mean that the flow of information is being delivered freely and uncensored, i.e. this story that we are commenting on.

Video by students in dormitory at Pitt university
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXXiO7hssKI&NR=1

Does anybody have any alternatives to Twitter, for a cellphone text broadcast system (i.e. the ability to send text messages from one location to any phone that wants that message.) If no one does, it doesn't seem too hard to duplicate. Maybe for the next big action we can be non-twitterized. Hackers, techies, phone freeks please figure it out.

Beyond that (and this is not a guilt-trip), get your primary email and any that you get any radical materials to, away from Google and Hotmail. There are so many alternatives.

This is Identi.ca, a micro-blogging service based on the Free Software StatusNet tool. Join now to share notices about yourself with friends, family, and colleagues!

How is Identi.ca different from Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, Plurk, others?

Identi.ca is an Open Network Service. Our main goal is to provide a fair and transparent service that preserves users' autonomy. In particular, all the software used for Identi.ca is Free Software, and all the data is available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license, making it Open Data.

What the world doesn't need is more "social networking" sites or microblogging. Look at crabgrass a site put together by the folks at riseup.net if you want a good radical social network site. What we do need is an easy to get onto text message broadcaster for people on the go. Something that works on a browser is not good enough. Not everybody has mobile browsers or they are cost prohibitive or too hard to use for a quick read. I looked at identi.ca and it said nothing about getting it as a text message. Am i just not seeing it? Do any of the others you mentoned have the features i;ve stated.

they have it relying on twitter primarily now, but I heard them speak at a convergence last year and it can be done without twitter with just a little extra rigamarole. I'm sure if you contact them they'd explain it for you

indybay has used things like this before for actions. anyone remember the sms at the 2005 g8 demo in sf and at other events? that was way before twitter

as for the person above who mentioned masses using corporate sites so that being a good place to reach them, fine, sort of, if they even care about radical messages. but radical activists themselves should know better and should encourage others they know to seek out independent and open source solutions rather than so easily falling into the corporate media trap. large corporate sites would hand over your IP and any other info they have on you in a heartbeat and, if you think you're reaching a mainstream audience, remember that your radical content gets lost amongst 10,000,000 cute cat videos and photos

Meow! meow!

so this creates a dilemma. i totally understand the comments about not wanting to use corporate services like google/twitter/etc for revolutionary activity. but let's face it - right now the tools outside the corporate world are severely lacking, and the knowledge to implement them lies within an elite few in the radical community (in my experience, mostly men who aren't exactly dedicated to sharing the necessary skills).

i have a riseup account, but it breaks all the fracking time. if i want to be an effective organizer - part of which depends on being able to send and receive emails regularly - i have to use my gmail account instead. so i do. my riseup account is collecting dust.

similarly, i volunteer with the twin cities IMC. we use twitter to send out breaking news, because we want lots of people in the twin cities to hear about breaking news and be able to get it on their phones right away without glitches. no other service can provide this; even if services like identi.ca were as reliable, we aren't going to convince our hundreds of followers to suddenly switch.

so where does this leave us all? how can we bridge the gap between effectiveness and counter-tech-institutions? one can always, contrary to the saying, use the master's tools to take down the master's house, but we might as well have our own tools too. i'm curious to hear some possible answers to this dilemma from y'all.

Indybay itself syndicates news to Twitter, Identi.ca and elsewhere. But Indybay doesn't rely on any one corporate service.

Whether you're a radical in Iran or the US, you probably want to make use of a Twitter account that is tied to an anonymous e-mail address and SIM card, and use Tor to access the Twitter site anonymously.

Well for email you can use one of a thousand POP email services. I use an account at lavabit.com (formerly "nerdshack.com" - They have their shit together and are fully committed to privacy and security (so don't lose your password or username; there is no way to recover it because they don't log or keepa any database of the info.)

Get a POP email account and use Thunderbird to get and send your mail.