Twitter loses its resilience in Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia's Communications and Information Technology Commission has recently blocked access to Twitter accounts of two Saudi human rights activists because the authorities didn't like the human rights angle of theit Twittering. Reporters Without Borders has more background on the offenders:

Nasser, who keeps a blog called Mashi Sah (“That’s not true”) said his Twitter messages included references to the human rights situation and governance in Saudi Arabia and links to human rights sites. Abdelkhair, a human rights lawyer and head of a Saudi human rights organisation, had also referred to human rights violations in his “tweets,” the short text messages that are Twitter’s speciality. Ahmed Al-Omran, a blogger who first drew attention to the situation, said it was the first time the authorities had moved against Twitter users in Saudi Arabia

Wait a second. Wasn't Twitter supposed to be "resilient to censorship" and hard to block? Here's Harvard's Jonathan Zittrain again on Twitter in Iran (I swear to use this quote every time something goes wrong with Twitter controls :-): " Twitter was particularly resilient to censorship because it had so many ways for its posts to originate — from a phone, a Web browser or specialized applications — and so many outlets for those posts to appear."

You can't fault Zittrain's logic on this one: in fact, I can still access the accounts of the two Saudi activists from New York. Lucky me. The problem is that I wouldn't be able to do so if I were, say, in Jeddah, where the primary audience of their Twitter feeds is. Who cares if you can post to Twitter if your followers can't read it?

So much for the myth of Twitter's resilience.