nationalpost:

Twitter to censor content in some countries
Twitter announced Thursday that it would begin restricting Tweets in certain countries, marking a policy shift for the social media platform that helped propel the popular uprisings recently sweeping across the Middle East.

“As we continue to grow internationally, we will enter countries that have different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression,” Twitter wrote in a blog post published Thursday.

Twitter gave as examples of restrictions it might cooperate with “certain types of content, such as France or Germany, which ban pro-Nazi content.”

A Twitter spokeswoman declined to elaborate on the blog.

“Starting today, we give ourselves the ability to reactively withhold content from users in a specific country while keeping it available in the rest of the world,” the Twitter blog said.

Twitter’s decision to begin censoring content represents a significant departure from its policy just one year ago, when anti-government protesters in Tunisia, Egypt and other Arab countries coordinated mass demonstrations through on the social network and, in the process, thrust Twitter’s disruptive potential into the global spotlight. (Brett Gundlock/National Post)

it’s almost as if they WANTED to be irrelevant

life:

BREAKING: Kim Jong-Il is dead.

The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) remains the world’s longest-lived dictatorship, home to a near-perfect cult of personality that rulers like Stalin and Mao only dreamed of. Today, more than six decades after its post-World War II creation, North Korea endures as a true digital-age rarity: a land largely unrecorded, even while its influence — on the global stage and the world’s imagination — intensifies.

LIFE asked five award-winning photographers to share their stories and photos — some of which have never before been published in the U.S. — from their travels in the North. The hazards of journeying to the DPKR as a Western journalist, covertly or in plain sight, are as numerous as they are dire. Shooting there requires skill, strategy, and guts; the five photojournalists here risked all to reveal the enigmatic universe behind the North Korean curtain. 

(see more — North Korea: Inside a Secret State)