Iraq tries to censor social media, but its success is limited

The Iraqi government moved to block access to Facebook, Twitter and YouTube in a bid to disrupt the social media tools deployed by insurgents as they have swept through the country in a bold drive toward Baghdad.

But the initiative ran into a hard reality of warfare in the 21st century: Losing physical ground means losing control of cyberspace as well. Companies that monitor Internet traffic reported significant declines in access to social media services in Baghdad and the immediate vicinity as providers complied with censorship orders from the Ministry of Communication.

Internet monitoring services detected several hours of outages in Iraq. In Iraq, overall Internet traffic was running at about one-third of its usual levels, according to Akamai, a network that delivers Internet content from servers across much of the world.

In addition to affecting Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, the outages also curbed access to WhatsApp and Viber, both of which provide instant messages through cellphones, said Collin Anderson, a researcher affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, who tested access within Iraq to thousands of top Web sites. “Anything that’s a social media site . . . that’s what they’re going after,” Anderson said.