What is worse than a social media campaign that backfires? Try a censorship scandal.

Etisalat, the UAE's biggest telecommunications company, is now at the center of a firestorm, after their "Etisalat Challenge," which began as an invitation for customers to find better prices for mobile packages in the UAE, quickly backfired on Twitter. Articles covering the campaign's failure ran on Arabian Business and The National ... only to be pulled down.

While the original stories are gone, it's a digital world and they can't scrub all traces of the censored articles from the web.