Censorship Testing for Social Media

Our mishap with Twitter can be used to test for censorship and/or for the boundaries of rules differences in the social media landscape.

We had this blog connected to to twitterfeed which then pushed the first couple of lines of each post out to Facebook and Twitter. twitterfeed also lets you push blog posts to LinkedIn, which we did not do. LinkedIn does not seem to be an appropriate platform for the stuff we write.

But there are other automation sites on the web, for example, Blogger to Tumblr pushes a blog post to tumblr,

If you type "feed blog to social media" into your favorite search engine, you will find more information.

A word of warning:
Of course, you may violate terms of service if you do not pay attention, so pay attention. Any thorough testing of what our provider friends are really up to should best be done by an organization that has the resources and the reputation to not be tossed around or intimidated. So, if you really want to probe, talk to a lawyer.

A research harness
In other words, make sure to define the project well. In these days of worries about who does what on the net, define clearly what you want to see and what the purpose of your results is. Maybe other previous research can help you frame the project better and help to make a decision whether you want to publish the results and to what depth.
Basically, this long sentence meant: you are on your own.

Is time is of the essence?
We have not seen any prohibition in Terms of Service (TOS) that expressly forbids testing for censorship or testing the scope of "content" and "behavior" rules. But there may be room for interpretation usable against you, and a TOS can be changed.

The setup
For testing, obviously, use only custom accounts that you do not need once they get blocked. Get yourself a handful of email accounts. Pick a source platform where you put the stuff you want to push out. It may be best to set up your very own platform with your very own software. This way, you have control and you are demonstrating to sites like wordpress or blogger that you have no intention of doing any harm.
Set up a handful of accounts with the social media sites you are interested in, hook up your source platform, and start writing.
In more technical terms, you set up a single source and push the content to multiple destinations (or targets). 

Don't forget
It's not easy to run any site of even modest size, much less one of the household name sites of the world. People are running them, and people make mistakes, so give them a little credit. Of course, you can call out obvious bullshit.