If the blogosphere is to be believed, after blocking access to Twitter a day ago, the Egyptian authorities now seem to have trained their guns on the popular social networking site FaceBook. Absurd as it may seem, but Tweets and FaceBook statuses of thousands of users from Arab speaking countries say that FaceBook has been blocked by Egyptian authorities; so much for free speech and online expression. Behavior such as this should only compel citizens to change their government and to reduce its authority and power over them.
Limiting the Flow of Information
The reason for doing so stems from the fact that protestors throughout the country were extensively utilizing the popular social networking sites Twitter and FaceBook to inspire their countrymen to join the protests against corrupt and an inefficient government. It is also reported that Egyptian netizens were inspired by the neighboring country Tunisia which also saw similar form of protests against the government. Though the authorities are neither denying nor affirming the move, it is not something new. China in particular has a bad history of blocking Internet access to specific content. Even the search engine giant Google was not spared and was banned for several months. The Chinese authorities wanted to block anti-China content and search capabilities of Google.
Outsmarting the Man
Though the authorities can block servers of specific websites and prevent users from accessing them, SEO optimization can overcome this problem. If the keywords are chosen perfectly, the same content can be distributed on other sites using some really intelligent SEO optimization. This has been done earlier in several cases. SEO optimization is not just for businesses; even humanitarian causes can be supported if SEO optimization is deployed intelligently.
