Twitter shut down the service the day after Matt Taibbi sent the inaugural Thunderclap, a tweet replicated by almost 2,000 supporters after a Kickstarter-esque campaign. "Weird, they suspended our OAuth token just now," Hashem Bajwa, founder of De-De, which makes Thunderclap, wrote in an email. "We figured they might. We're trying to reach people there."

Thunderclap lost access shortly after the second Thunderclap, a call on Congress to publish government data in bulk. It was tweeted by 128 people at noon simultaneously.

Tell Congress to provide simple access to congressional data. Innovation in government depends on it! #freeTHOMAS thndr.it/KTGbz8

— Thunderclap (@ThunderclapIt) June 7, 2012

It's likely that Twitter decided that Thunderclap was too close to being spam. Some Betabeat commenters would agree—"The article makes it sound noble, but the Thunderclap recipients are just inundated with junk," wrote one. Thunderclap bears some resemblance to FAME, a game that also got yanked by Twitter for triggering mass numbers of users to follow and unfollow each other in order to give one person a celebrity-level number of followers for a day.

Thunderclap had been contacted by a number of celebrities in the media and politics scene about potential Thunderclap campaigns, Mr. Bajwa told Betabeat in confidence. In a follow-up email, he mentioned that the White House had also been in touch.

"They gave us an automated reply that we are violating terms of service by sending multiple @mentions and automating sending tweets," he said. "A lot of services like Buffer automate. We are trying to contact some of the executives at Twitter now. Hope we can resolve it." Long term, Thunderclap was planning to include other social media sites, with a launch on Facebook planned in two weeks. Maybe Thunderclap can take its service to Weibo, the popular Chinese version of Twitter—then again, maybe not.

Weibo.com

Weibo, the popular Chinese microblogging service similar to Twitter, just rewrote its terms of service, and freedom of speech advocates are alarmed. Weibo introduced a new rule that will dock points for “spreading rumours,” “harming the unity of the nation,” “endangering national unity” and “disrupting social order,” and ban users who rack up too many violations. (The controversial artist Ai Wei Wei has been banned repeatedly.) Users can also gain points by giving up more of their personal information.

The rules appear to be in response to pressure from the Chinese government, which carefully monitors what's said on social media and news sites, qualifying it for Reporters Without Borders' "Enemies of the Internet" list. "The government has also forced microblogging sites such as Sina Weibo, Sohu, NetEase, Hexun to hire moderators to monitor activity and 'purge' problematic content," RWB says. The Chinese tech blog TechRice estimates Weibo has 65 to 70 million users.