Did Twitter Censor “No God” from Trending Topics?
“No God” was the top Trending Topic on Twitter for most of the day yesterday. Then, suddenly, it was completely off of the list leading many of bloggers to wonder if Twitter removed it purposely in an apparent act of censorship. Trending Topics are transient by their very nature. But, generally, the trending word(s) tend to roll down the list as usage declines. Did Twitter censor the Trending Topic list? Did they bow to pressure from Christian groups? I doubt it. Twitter has become such an icon of free speech and diversity that it has a lot to loose by censoring. But the question lingers. Hopefully, Twitter will come forward with a statement today indicating that it did not censor the Trending Topic list.
The phrase hit the Trending Topic list around 11:00 EST on Tuesday when @RevRunWisdom (Joseph Simmons, Run-D.M.C.) posted “Know God, know peace. No God, no peace.” to his 400,000 followers which then re-tweeted it in an apparent attempt to get the phrase listed on Twitter’s Trending Topics list. Atheists Twitter users then started tweeting a reversed version “No God, know peace” and the Twitter algorithm picked up the most common words in both phrases, “no god”, and added it to the Trending Topics list. When the Atheists saw what was happening, they simply started tweeting “no god”. When the Christians saw “no god” on the list they started tweeting “Know God, know peace. No God, no peace.” even more to try to push “no god” off the list, which compounded the effect. At one point there were thousands of references to “No God” per minute.
Poll: Did Twitter censor “No God”?
after a brief discussion on twitter about the topic of censorship i would have to say they did, based on the fact that it did not harm atheists or christians..so the question now is who or what were they helping / doing it for
http://attemptsatrationalbehavior.blogspot.com/20...
http://trendistic.com/no-god/know-god/censorship/...
They rolled "no god" into "know god". That's manual intervention. And it killed the TT.
i had noticed that , proves "knowing god" is not much of a trend lol
It makes me crazy. Everyday I feel offended by christians blessing me without stopping to consider I may not want to hear about it. We are the 'bad' ones because we take the responsibility to accept the reality so many want to hide from. It would be so much easier to be one of them if only I could short hand myself. I found it refreshing to see No God day. It gave me a sparkle of hope that there enough out there like me that are going to make a difference on this planet and this was just a start. The more its said the more its accepted. I'll keep pushing forward with what I know is the truth. No, I wont know a false god. Thanks for trying to shove it down my throat Twitter. You ain't the first.
I'm as atheist as the next guy but try to look at this objectively.
Christians post a (silly) message containing the words "know god" and "no god". The intent was clearly on the "know god" part of this.
Atheists post a ton of "no god" messages. Clearly the intent was on the "no god" phrase topping the TT.
The point of the TT is to at least somewhat accurately identify real trending topics. Atheists creatively exploited this to shove "know god" off the list for "no god". I applaud it, but in order to be accurate you would have to distinguish between the theist "know god/no god" tweets and the atheist "no god" tweets. This would properly distinguish the messages for the TT but I don't think Twitter's algorithm is that smart – it just looks at words, not meaning behind the words, sentence structure, etc.
So here Twitter is faced with a decision to correct an exploit (call it what you want but that's exactly what it is) and they can either
A) simply OR "know god"/"no god" or
B) examine each message, look for AND "know god"/"no god" and treat that separate from "no god" just for this one incident.
From a programming perspective, A is much easier.
One could conceive of a conspiracy theory that this was all a big plot by christians to use this as an excuse to completely bump "no god" from the TT list which, according to the above post, didn't exist on the TT until yesterday. Plus I don't think christians are that smart. Likewise I don't see this as a vast right wing conspiracy by Twitter to censor the atheist particularly when you examine the tactics used.
Actually, it's been proven through evidence that the term 'no god' was trending about 2x or more than any listed TT even after it was pulled from the list and joined up know god. It is an insidious manipulation of search terms to have a tweet without the word 'know' in it at all show up only under the pro-religious 'know god' link.
1. Link to evidence?
2. Theists tweet "know god…blah blah….no god…blah blah" 10 times.
Know god = 10
No god = 10
Atheist tweets "no god"
Know god = 10
No god = 20
What's your point? Of course it will show up 2x or more!
Also even after the logical OR was performed that ratio wouldn't change so you would still have 2x or more.
You can't speak of hope without God.
there is no god. get over it. have hope for humanity. I can speak of hope without a god – that's just ridiculous!
More to the point.. if there is no God, don't you have better things to do than get your lack of belief into a TT? Surely it would be better to not even have mention of God on the radar than continually bring it up? (after all, most people when confronted with the question "does God exist", even those who woul not normally think about it, would answer on the affirmative side)