Same-Sex Marriage Foes Accuse Twitter of Censorship

The Alliance Defense Fund  -- whose attorneys are co-counsels in the ongoing Proposition 8 trial -- claims that Twitter updates from @AllianceDefense, @ProtectMarriage, @ADFmedia, and @AllianceAlert have been blocked from Twitter's search function. While all four accounts have been tweeting over the past 24 hours, especially regarding the Prop. 8 trial, almost all of those tweets don't show up via Twitter's search function.

For example, searching "From:AllianceDefense" at 8:45 a.m. last revealed a tweet sent 20 hours ago, though scores of tweets have been sent on that account since then (some of which accuse Twitter of blocking the account). Searches show no results whatsoever for @AllianceAlert and @ADFmedia, and imply such accounts do not exist -- though all of these accounts have been active (and exist). The conservative groups have been imploring readers to retweet their posts, as retweets are showing up on Twitter's search, even while original tweets are not.

Our calls to the Alliance Defense Fund and e-mails to Twitter have not yet been returned -- yet it's far from a foregone conclusion that some manner of conspiracy is under way, as the Alliance Defense Fund alleges. For one thing, @ProtectMarriage's tweets are showing up on the search function and none were blocked.

Also, when we fed accounts into the Twitter search function that had no connection to same-sex marriage, Prop. 8, or conservative political causes, we found that, sometimes, their results didn't properly show up either. For example, SF Weekly's own Web editor, Alexia Tsotsis, is a dedicated Twitter user. But when you search for her account, it comes up as having no results whatsoever:

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