They absolutely did - at the behest of the US State Department. Twitter was scheduled to have some planned downtime during the Egyptian Arab Spring, but they postponed it at the request of State. Evgeny talks about this.
That depends on your perspective. I support the intentions of the Arab Spring, but I still think it's inherently nefarious for a private technology company to partner with the US government in order to overthrow governments. I also seriously doubt that they were simply sitting idly by and hoping that the revolution went their way, as we now see that most all world governments have their own online propaganda divisions.
It's a long way from postponing scheduled downtime to 'partnering with the US government in order to overthrow governments'. I don't have any difficult seeing how someone could view the former as nefarious but they aren't the same thing.
No, I mean what I wrote. I don’t have to agree with it but there are plenty of people who think cooperation, however indirect, with a US foreign policy goal is bad. It’s a viewpoint. Calling a thing something that it isn’t is not a viewpoint, it’s just wrong.
I think perhaps you misunderstood me? You're saying:
> I don't have any [difficulty] seeing how someone could view [postponing scheduled downtime] as nefarious but they aren't the same thing.
Didn't you instead mean the following?
> I don't have any [difficulty] seeing how someone could view [partnering with the US government in order to overthrow governments] as nefarious but they aren't the same thing.
Or maybe you did mean that postponing scheduled downtime looks nefarious to some. It just seemed like a weird thing to say compared to the other option.
At a minimum it makes you wonder what vested interest the state department had in making sure twitter stayed up. It couldn't have just been for the humanitarian benefiet, it makes me think that they also had a part to play in the social media traffic itself.
I mean, i dont want to make this political but who was the secretary of state during this time and was simultaneous receiving funding to their foundation from saudi arabia as well?
