Tuesday, October 20, 2009

"No God" Trending War on Twitter


In an amusing piece of Twitter history, the topic "No God" started trending today when tech savvy Christians (apparently led by @RevRunWisdom) began re-tweeting the old phrase, "Know God, Know Peace. No God, No Peace." Then, as atheists, agnostics, and secularists poked fun by retweeting just "No God" or "Know God, No Peace. No God, Know Peace," the topic became the most popular trending phrase of the day. So popular, in fact, that Twitter has been unable to cope with the increase in traffic. In an unfortunate effort to maintain the site, Twitter moderators have censored the offending topic. However, this act has only exacerbated the problem, igniting a firestorm of twittering protests from irreligious and free speech proponents alike.

Has Twitter acted responsibly or is the social networking site headed toward a potential PR disaster? Be sure to leave a comment below!

Related Articles:
"No God #1 Trending Topic on Twitter"
PZ Myers "Fun with Twitter"
"On Twitter, War Waged Over 'No God, No Peace'"
Trendistic "No God vs Know God"

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

absolutely. i am disturbed that twitter has removed no god from trending topics and it definitely appears to be censorship. i thought the topic was generating extremely interesting tweets. i can't wait for twitter's official statement on this whole matter.

Jay said...

I agree. I wonder if this will all get swept under the rug or if Twitter will respond in some official way.

Unknown said...

Twitter is such a waste of (cyber)space.

Travels of Adam said...

Twitter is pretty useful, but less so for useless trending topics.

Mack Ramer said...

PR Disaster? Unlikely. The set of people the media report on and the set of people who care about Twitter trending topics are disjoint.