"For Chinese petitioners, if their protest applications were approved, it would lead to a chain reaction of others seeking to voice their problems as well," Mr. Li said.
Officials say that they received 77 protest applications but that nearly all of them were dropped after the complaints were "properly addressed by relevant authorities or departments through consultations".
On Monday, when they returned to the police station to follow up on their protest applications, the women were told they had been sentenced to one year at a labor camp for "disturbing public order".
Sheriff Ronnie Strength of Richmond County, who has the power to approve or reject protest applications and their locations in Augusta, has repeatedly said that he will oppose any demonstrations near the club's entrance gates, because of the heavy traffic during the tournament.
But the fact that Twitter would change its downtime maintenance to accommodate a wide spectrum of protest applications is a sign that Twitter has acknowledged its active role in supporting the protests, says Rob Faris, the research director at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society.
In China, the company has restricted access to Dalai Lama-related iPhone applications, and earlier this year it removed a Palestinian protest iPhone application called ThirdIntifada in response to the Israeli government's complaints.
It also gives an individual or City Council the ability to protest the application.
They are accompanied by the ongoing and widespread use of deadly violence by security forces on Egyptian citizens exercising their internationally recognized right to protest, the application of mass death sentences after severely flawed and politicized judicial processes, and the use of torture, long-term detention without trial and other forms of mistreatment of detainees by the government.
Dozens of county residents, and even the manager of the local utility, protested the application because they thought it could become a threat to the community's drinking supply.
"I can understand if they said reduce your fish quotas, or reduce the number of fishing days, but the truth is they're shutting us down," said Ettore Iani, president of Legapesca, a national fish trade association that has vociferously protested the application of the regulations that will have an impact on the catch of smaller fish.
