Twitter blocked links to Kickass.to, the 2nd largest torrent index online. Users trying to access the website via Twitter receive a warning that the website may be unsafe and potentially harmful. In the meantime, Twitter provided no comments about the reason for this unusual blockade.

KickassTorrents accounts for millions of unique daily visitors, which makes it one of the most used BitTorrent trackers, trailing only behind The Pirate Bay. Kickass indexes millions of torrents, which can then be shared via various social media, including Twitter. For instance, writer Alex Sayf Cummings published a link to a torrent of his own book “Music Piracy And The Remaking Of American Copyright” in a tweet recently. He was obviously inviting people to get a free copy of the book from the website, but Twitter wasn’t making it easy. People who click on the link to Kickass faced an ominous warning: “The site you were trying to visit may be unsafe! This link has been flagged as potentially harmful”. In addition, the social network points out that users can proceed to the website at their own risk, but not everyone will do so.

The first question is why Twitter decided KickassTorrents is a dangerous website. The company claims to use Google’s safe browsing diagnostic instrument, but it is known that the Kickass.to domain isn’t blocked there. Moreover, KickassTorrent’s old domain Kat.ph gets the same blocking treatment. It seems that Twitter has for some reason decided that this particular torrent tracker is a forbidden zone for its users. Twitter’s help section says that even if Google’s diagnostic report of the link is clean, it may decide to continue blocking it as potentially harmful.

Some experts believe that the blockade has something to do with the fact that KickassTorrent links to copyright infringing files. Facebook also used to restrict access to The Pirate Bay for the same reason. However, the company reversed that decision after a few months.

Thus far, KickassTorrents is the only large torrent tracker blocked by the microblogging platform, but it may be just the start.

Thanks to TorrentFreak for providing the source of the article.