Newsletter
Twitter is one of the most popular social media websites around the world. Created in the year 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, Evan Williams; the social networking service allows users to express themselves in the form of short messages limited to 140-characters. Over the 9 years that Twitter has been available to the public, numerous users have been using it to publicize all kinds of news and relevant stories. In fact, inside some countries and regions, Twitter is the only place where the anyone in the population is able to express themselves without the fear of being reprimanded by the government or any oppressing party. Sometimes, the oppression is so strong that several social networking sites are completely banned from the region; a team of developers have looked into this huge issue and took action to provide the population with an alternative client that gives users the ability to connect to the social platform.
With a new application called FireTweet, users in every single part of the world will be able to access Twitter without being censored by their own governments. There have been other services that provide authoritarian regimes like China or Iran with a way to access the internet without being censored, but they are mostly limited to desktop computers. There are only a few applications that give oppressed citizens unrestricted entry to the internet; FireTweet is one of these few. The new application was developed by a team of developers called Lantern, which is responsible for other desktop software to aid users with a censored or completely blocked internet connection.
FireTweet functions using a P2P network, this means that any user inside a restricted area will connect to another user in a non-restricted one; ultimately giving their users the freedom to express themselves in any way they want. Adam Fisk, leader of the Lantern team, expressed that the main goal of FireTweet is just to provide access; this goal, as simple as it sounds, will allow a great number of people to escape the fear of their government for a while. With FireTweet, everyone that lives in a region where the government takes any action necessary to control their citizen’s lives, will be able to express their thoughts without any kind of fear or remorse.
