Why Is The WikiLeaks Twitter Account Only Following TweetBackup?

Alexia Tsotsis

Alexia Tsotsis is the co-editor of TechCrunch. She attended the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, CA, majoring in Writing and Art, and moved to New York City shortly after graduation to work in the media industry. After four years of living in New York and attending courses at New York University, she returned to Los Angeles in... → Learn More

Sunday, December 5th, 2010

Even though Amazon and Paypal have severed their relationships with the controversial to say the least WikiLeaks, the @WikiLeaks Twitter account is still holding strong. Some are wondering why Twitter has as of yet to cut ties with the service after this week’s leak of 251,287 diplomatic cables, which pissed some high powered people off to put it lightly.

Perhaps WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is wondering the same thing. Which would explain why only account @WikiLeaks is following at the moment is @TweetBackup, a service that allows you to back up your tweets daily.

Tweetbackup, run by Backupify, requires that you follow it in order to use it, which means that Assange has no other choice but to follow if he wants Tweetbackup to preserve his tweets in case of a takedown.

It’s interesting to note that by some kind of default Assange, who has all eyes on him at the moment, is basically advertising one service and coincidentally one that protects your Twitter data in cases of deletion. I’ve contacted Twitter as to whether they would take down the @WikiLeaks account under any circumstances and have yet to hear back.

In the meantime TweetBackup representative Charlie Ungashick tells TechCrunch that they haven’t tried to DM Assange, despite being the only people in the world who have the power to do so. I’m amazed at their powers of resistance and/or indifference.

Company: WikiLeaks
Website: wikileaks.ch
Launch Date: 2007

WikiLeaks is a not-for-profit media organization. Their goal is to bring important news and information to the public. They provide an innovative, secure and anonymous way for sources to leak information to our journalists (our electronic drop box). WikiLeaks has sustained and triumphed against legal and political attacks designed to silence their publishing organisation, journalists and anonymous sources. The broader principles on which their work is based are the defence of freedom of speech and media publishing, the improvement...

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Company: Backupify
Website: backupify.com
Launch Date: November 2008
Funding: $19.5M

Backupify is the leading backup provider for cloud based data, offering an all-in-one archiving, search and restore solution for the most popular online services including Gmail, Facebook and Twitter. With one account you get centralized access to all of your information, stored securely, easily searchable, and ready for restoration or transfer at a moment’s notice.

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