By Fadi Abu Deeb

Unfortunately, today my Twitter account was suspended.  The reason is unclear, since Twitter, unlike Facebook, does not inform its users about the reason for such an action.  It is the second act of censorship I’m exposed to in less than a week, after my Facebook account was banned from using some minor features of FB because of one (ironic) post I wrote in August.
The suspension that I’ve got on Twitter is inclusive.  Now I can’t get any updates on my homepage, cannot tweet, and the people that follow me and the ones whom I follow have evaporated!  It is unclear why this procedure has been conducted against my account.  I doubt that the reason can be some of the articles I published after the Turkish invasion of Syria.

In fact, I don’t care a lot about my Twitter account.  It’s been there for 8 years without a real use or benefit.  But my real concern is the increasing censorship we are witnessing these days everywhere, much of it- I’m afraid- is carried out by blind algorithms that cannot distinguish meanings but merely run after words and phrases to block them, and without even informing the user that such utterances have already been classified as forbidden (as if this will be ethical anyway!)
This is not good.  We are moving towards bad times.  And it seems that those who are fond of controlling our lives have just found new invincible ways to domineer the world population.  I might have done something incorrect, but I’ve never been warned or given a chance to remove something I wrote.  Things are becoming automatic and artificial.  The machine is winning I’m afraid, and those who promote freedom are being deprived of their ability to negotiate the new situation of the world, whether concrete or virtual.