Slashdot Mirror
Twitter Can Now Block Tweets In Specific Countries
itwbennett writes "In a blog post on Thursday, Twitter announced that it can now block individual Tweets in specific countries, while leaving them visible in other countries. 'We try to keep content up whenever and wherever we can, and we will be transparent with users when we can't,' the blog said. Twitter will publish requests it receives to block content through its partnership with Chilling Effects."
A brilliant means of censorship. Gotta love Big Brother.
Actually I am a lab rat in an elaborate plot to take over the world.
Some guy in *insert dictatorship here* wont get the latest update from my fart detecting chair!
This has nothing to do with censorship. It's about a company respecting other countries laws and their sovereignty. A lot of other countries do not hold the same western values of free speech as the rest of us. Why can't some people respect that?
Their countries, their laws. If companies want to do business there or not be blocked, they should respect them. I applaud Twitter on taking this step.
Head of Google India just tried to convince the adamant govt that it is impossible to censor content in India as the content/Internet has no borders.
Good luck to Google and others for convincing the Kapil Sibal this time.
Colour me shocked.
http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/12/19/saudi-prince-invests-300-million-in-twitter/
If you voted for Nader, THIS IS ALL YOUR FAULT!!
Why would twitter even, work to create such a functionality? Is this in reaction to SOPA, were they afraid they'd end up getting shut down in the USA if it passed and they don't want to be caught with their pants down?
Even so if this was the case why advertise it? How long before some draconian government demands that twitter use this to censor it's site 'for' its citizens.
People living in repressive governments have been using proxies for years. This is irrelevant.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
I'm really starting to get sick and tired of all this damn 1940s style censorship.
I wouldn't necessarily applaud them for this - operating under the laws of a specific country may well be a case of having their hands tied.
However this is the right way to go about applying government censorship, if there is such a thing. Let those in the censoring country see a "your government has banned this tweet" message, and letting everyone else see "The X government has banned this Tweet, but here it is because you're not in X" will shed light on what was being censored, will shed light on the censorship itself, and both the attention and the trivial nature of defeating censorship will let those in the relevant country see it anyway.
That is something that arguably can be applauded.
How am I supposed to build a webpage, when I have no clue what hyperlinked content will actually be available to the viewer? This is ridiculous.
#ABANDONTWITTER - can I be the first to say it? YES! The internet was a great tool to work around a lot of problems... what ever happened?
if you think fox news is bad, try cnn. Last time I watched, I thought twitter had bought their own network to do nothing but read tweets.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
A lot of other countries do not hold the same western values of free speech as the rest of us. Why can't some people respect that?
Because free speech is a natural right that all human beings are born with. It has absolutely nothing at all to do with "western values" (whatever the hell those are). The fact is that all human beings have the ability to engage in free speech; Governments or individuals may punish you for exercising that ability but the ability is still there. It's the same with the 2nd Amendment really -- you can regulate weapons all you want but people can still obtain and use them. Doubt this? Ask the guy who just got shanked in prison if the person who stabbed him didn't keep and bear arms.
BTW, you need not limit yourself to the US Constitution. From the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:
Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people,
Whereas it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law,
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Whatever happened to corporate values?
In return for more revenue, companies like Twitter seem to throw all their corporate values in the garbage bin.
The tragic thing is that Twitter does fail to mention on who's behalf they block the content.....
No kidding. I was watching CNN a few days ago, just catching up before I went to work and they were mentioning rain in the northwest. They started reading tweets about the weather and the one I remember was "rain rain, go away".
How insightful.
Gone!
http://xkcd.com/912/
just ban Twitter completely and call it a day? I mean honestly, I can't think of a better Internet entity where "and nothing of value was lost" applies.
---
DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzNkolUVBlQ
Now I know I will never get a Twitter account.
On FiOS TV where I live, you'll often see a "Check out CNN on Twitter" prompt while watching the channel. Push the relevant magic button and you're staring at their channel.
I won't be surprised if we hear about another TimeWarner-Internet Giant merger soon. CNN really does seem to at least mention or show staff @UserNames whenever there's screen space. It starts to annoy me when I see @brookebcnn float in that little box every few seconds like it was some sort of bikini girl on a raft in a pool.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
Where are you?
Guess they were sacrificed in the name of global business interests. When I was a child my father taught me that America was a great country because censorship (in most forms) was completely absent from the the public mind. Hell, I remember reading about the days when leaflets were dropped by American bombers. We shoved our norm of "Freedom of Speech" in everyone faces. We laughed in the face of Communism and censorship. Those were the days...
In this country, any man could stand on a street corner and say what is on his mind. The soapbox on the street is no different from 140 character blurbs shouted out online, but for whatever reason 'people' (i.e. companies and governments) seem to think otherwise. You give an inch, and they'll take a foot. You give a foot, and apparently you end up with companies giving up to foreign regimes like prom girls. Moreover, you have our own legislatures supporting legislation like SOPA and PIPA. I'm guessing the next laws that are passed will form some brand of domestic secret police that's out to stop online piracy, and oh yeah, track down individuals who make defaming comments that "hurt the feelings" of some regime or foreign leader with less than a primary school education. We'll get our act together once our extradition treaties start being used to ship expats away to their country of origin for their ideas and comments said here.
At this rate the very idea of freedom of speech will be gone within our generation.
my mom posts on slashdot.
Partnership with chilling effects...this is somewhat ironic.
The universal nature of human rights and freedoms is beyond question.
-- 2005 World Summit, paragraph 121
Wouldn't it be better if the countries in question had to block Twitter altogether to get rid of dissent? - That would cause more frustration and more anger towards the authorities, thus hopefully resulting in a revolution. Greyed out tweets won't have the same effect, and the goal here must be freedom from any form of censorship, right?
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --
What you're arguing for is 'cultural relativism'.
Your post just seems too well crafted, and feels trollish to me, but in case this is actually that you think, 'cultural relativism' lost.
All international human rights instruments adhere to the principle that human rights are universally applicable.
Countries who violate peoples freedom though censorship are universally in the wrong.
I routinely post AC, even though I have a /. account. Want to know why? So that that any of the insider knowledge I have limits it's damage to /. if I decide to shoot my mouth off about a previous employer or some other entity. It's much easier to just post as AC than it is to create an account that can be purged or censored all at once.
This is the lesson for Twitter. Censoring individual tweets, treating them like spam, are the same thing. But The US is the only country in the world where free speech is enshrined by the Constitution. In every other country, you do not have free speech, and saying the wrong thing as a citizen of that country can send you to jail, even though you said it on a foreign website.
In some cases it's morally safer to remove free speech when it puts the practioner of the speech into severe danger. The Westboro loonys may say some horrible things, but they do so at their own peril. It's one thing Americans tend to forget, is that their free speech ends at the US Border.
I'm a developer for a major newspaper firm.
Let me tell you... for *years*, we've been deleting people's posts but to them it still seems like they're posted. The system is adept enough to also show thier comments to anyone friended to them, and it also shows up via a direct URL link. But in the main page, no one sees crap.
This is the way it is on the 30+ newspapers I help develop the core platform of. Right here in the United States.
I can prevent my own content from appearing in certain countries from my blog or other web sources.
This isn't a Freedom of Speech issue, guys. Twitter is an online service. They can show or hide content however they feel. This isn't like the government stepping in and preventing access -- it's a non-government entity doing stuff with its own content. Is it annoying? Sure. Bad precedent? Maybe. However, the "the sky is falling" SlashDot crowd is jumping the gun a bit, even for them.
You are naive. Pirates are just the strawmen, the real goal of SOPA is to eliminate all user-generated content that threatens the monopoly of the Big Media.
Hmm, even the schools and prisons fail at eliminating "user-generated content". Ultimately, Big Media may usurp the Internet and push us all out, but we will find another way. As long as we have any means of communication, we will exchange the products of our creative minds.
What will probably happen is Big Media will push laws to allow them to appropriate user-generated content and sell it in exchange for 5-minutes fame for the authors, and sheepish masses will be content with it and even love it! Alternative channels will be deemed criminal "black market of ideas", demonized and suppressed. The latter is already happening as we speak, for the former they need to somehow legally differentiate between commercial, "real" IP producers and "amateurs" or "client authors", "petty authors" etc. , but I don't doubt they will think of something. For now we have reality programs and contracts, but with adequate law in place, they could save on legal expenses.
I have been saying it.. like many of us..all we need is a strong hacker grid + we need (now that individual cos are filtering our data) we need to put up an independent twitter AND/OR facebook like network working in the hacker grid itself ! :) network being based on such as those of "tor" (onion routing) :D
that way we will be able to share our data + the information like we are on twitter/facebook and people would also be able to access it safely and securely too from the WWW (this specifically could be optional)
what say fellas?
How do I subscribe to a Twitter feed of the blocked tweets?
... the military industrial complex is to get to know each other around the world, that there are no ghost in the closet or monsters under the bed, that the mass majority of people on this planet are to busy living their daily lives to have any motive to go to the other side of the planet and kill people they never met. But the military industrial complex has their war tactics to cut communications of the enemy. And that makes the people, the 99% the enemy to... Who?
...is that they announced this, publicly, as if it's something they are actually proud of.
WTF?
I don't know why social media sites (facebook, twitter) think they can do whatever they want without any backlash.
Myspace thought the same thing, and look where they are now.
Just because you're on top today, doesn't mean you will be tomorrow.
And yes, I'm just pissed because you KNOW the US government is going to dip its fat fingers into this.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
There are seven pitches in the musical scale if you ignore octaves and accidentals. A note can be short or long compared to other notes. With 14 possibilities of (pitch, duration), you can fit two notes into one byte. This way, a tweet hold not only the nine notes sufficient for accidental infringement (Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music) but also the entire recognizable melody of the first verse and chorus of a popular song.
Maybe its because they don't have any other news to report because the government is censoring it?
I'm beginning to think that a blinking 12 government beats one that tells you it is 13 o'clock with a perfectly straight face.
What's so wrong with telling someone it's 1 PM? It'll be 13:00 in about six minutes in my time zone.
Twitter is a US company. Why does it care if someone tweets something objectionable in another country? This isn't Twitter's problem!
What motive does Twitter have to help oppressive regimes oppress their people? Are they being bribed by foreign governments? I just don't see how this can benefit Twitter when those foreign governments have no say in how Twitter is run.
B) Disney Channel wasn't on basic cable when I was growing up. Until 1997, it was considered premium, as HBO is today.
No need, CNN censors itself.
Gone!
they'll grey out the tweet using the same technology used to redact sensitive information in PDFs.
Have gnu, will travel.