This week in social media, Turkey lifted its Twitter ban, Vine and ChatOn added ShapChat features, WhatsApp experienced growing pains, and it turns out that the U.S. government created a "Cuban Twitter" to stir Cuban unrest against their leaders. It's time for Social Media Saturday!

Twitter

The Turkish government unblocked Twitter on Thursday, after the country's Constitutional Court declared that the ban -- imposed by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan after getting ticked off at users spreading corruption allegations against him on Twitter -- violated the country's freedom of expression. According to the New York Times, Turkey's highest court declared the Twitter ban "illegal, arbitrary and a serious restriction on the right to obtain information."

Turkey had also completely blocked YouTube, after a leaked conversation ostensibly between top government officials who were discussing the possibility of going to war in Syria jarred the country's ruling political class. That ban was also declared contrary to freedom of expression by a court on Friday, according to CNN, though it appeared that much of YouTube continued to be blocked in Turkey as of Friday.

"Cuban Twitter"

Speaking of Twitter, if you were in Cuba before 2012, you might have used "ZunZuneo," named after slang for the sound of a Cuban hummingbird and ostensibly a cheap Cuban version of the text-heavy social media network. If so, you were using a social media network secretly set up by the U.S. Agency for International Development's (USAID, part of the State Department).

That's according to an exclusive exposé released by the Associated Press this week, which was based on over 1,000 pages of documents and multiple interviews of people involved in the "Cuban Twitter" project. As we reported, the operation reportedly used a maze of shell companies to keep the U.S. government's backing a secret, creating ZunZuneo with the hope of gaining subscribers through "non-controversial content" but then eventually stirring popular unrest against the Cuban government.

The exposure of USAID's program brings questions of whether the foreign aid agency was acting like a Cold War-era clandestine intelligence agency, or whether the program was consistent with USAID's mission to promote democracy and free speech around the world through development programs. That, and much more, will be discussed this Tuesday, as the USAID's governing Senate subcommittee has called a hearing on the matter.

Vine

More Twitter-related news this week, as the company's video sharing network, Vine, announced "Vine Messages" (VM). VMs are private video and text messages users can send directly to friends. The messages are one-on-one, even when sending the same message to up to eight people, another feature of VMs. The move by Vine essentially adds a central feature of SnapChat, multiple private conversations, to the six-second video network.

Social Messaging Apps

Speaking of social messaging and adding SnapChat features, Samsung's ChatON global messaging service -- which comes preinstalled on Samsung devices and is a direct competitor to Facebook's recently-acquired WhatsApp -- got an update this week.

ChatON Version 3.5, as Samsung announced, adds a "recall" feature, which allows users to make sent messages disappear on the receiver's device, even if the message has already been viewed -- just like SnapChat's 10-second self-destruct feature. The update also increases the size of sharable multimedia files to 1GB and introduces integration with geo-location app Glympse.

Despite ChatON's adjustments, WhatsApp remains the most popular messaging service in the world, announcing via Twitter (irony) that it hit a new daily record on Tuesday.

With 64 billion total messages in one (random) day, beating the company's previous record for 54 billion last New Years Eve, no wonder Facebook thought the app was worth $19 billion. But the next day, WhatsApp experienced its second major outage this year since being acquired by the largest social media network in the world, according to TechCrunch. Growing pains.

"Growing" is the apt word for all social messaging apps, according to a study released by mobile ad analytics company Flurry this week. Among other findings, Flurry's analysis showed that social messaging apps like ShapChat, ChatON, BBM, and WhatsApp have grown in the past year to take up almost 10 percent of all average U.S. consumer's time spent on their mobile devices.

Interesante: Pinterest for Latinos

In our corner of the social media news universe, the winner of the first-ever Latino Startup of the Year competition was announced at Hispanicize 2014, the Miami-based "unconference" for all things Latino. We were there reporting the competition's finals, when Interesante took home the grand prize. In practice, Interesante looks like Pinterest, but partners with specifically Latino and Latin American ecommerce to help Latino and Latinas discover and share authentic content and products. Congrats on your grand prize win!

Latin Post Tech's Twitter Debut! Follow Us

Latin Post Tech also took the opportunity while reporting news throughout the week at Hispanicize 2014 to launch our official @LatinPostTech Twitter account, where you can find our coverage of live events, as well as features, roundups, and opinion - and lots of other stuff we find interesting throughout the vast reaches of the web.

And, of course, for all the news we cover at Latin Post, follow us at our official @Latin_Post account.