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According to Mahmud, the model can “predict”, via Twitter, the hometown of a user, finding it among the 100 largest cities in the U.S. within seconds and “guess” it with 70% accuracy. And as the Wall Street Journal informs, the team, pleased with the results, has already submitted a request to obtain a patent on the algorithm.

Your location and other personal data are available not only to Twitter of course. We will call this restriction of data sharing "self-censorship".

Governments do not like social networks, because they cannot control and manipulate them.

The last recent example is Turkey where Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan threatened to "eradicate" Twitter, which disseminated recordings of intercepted telephone conversations, undermining the reputation of the government before the local elections. This is just a drop in the ocean, as they say.

Social networks have become a place to promote ideas and organize people of interest. When it comes to yoga, flowers or Cynology, nobody* will mind (nobody* = government). However, when social networks are used to organize those dissatisfied with someone's policy or to organize protests against the government, then they become "dangerous". Social networks are increasingly becoming hostage to political processes in certain countries. They are monitored and banned due to the inability of controlling and censoring them. On investintech.com you can see an interactive map showing the countries where there are bans on some social networking websites. Of course, we will call this censorship "political" but also a violation of the right of free access to information.

Social networks are changing and from a means of communication they are turning into a means of doing business, organizing groups of people with similar political and social ideas, and into a source of personal information to advertisers and... the special services. Everyone finds their reason to use them. Let us not forget that they are a tool and like any tool they can be used for a variety of purposes, both good and bad. The initial enthusiasm is over and it is time to look at this phenomenon in an unbiased manner. Censorship on social networks is real, whether it is self-censorship, internal censorship or external. Keep this in mind the next time you log onto your favourite social network, someone somewhere is watching and the outgoing information is being filtered.