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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.
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.
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.
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.
No, it is very relevant. Besides the fact that not everyone knows about proxies(and they are still not trivial to use on mobile devices, which is what many protesters use), you also have the fact that this is very much a "silent" form of censorship. Unlike less "refined" methods of censorship(for instance the "great firewall of China" where whole sites are blocked), you may not even realize that something had been censored. I doubt there are a significant number of people so paranoid that they constantly connect via a proxy just to check their twitter, esp. since proxies can often introduce a non-trivial amount of latency.
Monstar L
Don't be a dick vencs, (short for "Venkat"? lame)
Google's statement was about not doing it in real-time and against filtering before publishing - think about it. Twitter has also NOT said it will be filtering in real-time. There will obviously be some time period between when a tweet is published, deemed "offensive", and then censored in a particular country.
Twitter has NOT agreed to do something that Google previously didn't agree to.
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.
No, it is very relevant. Besides the fact that not everyone knows about proxies(and they are still not trivial to use on mobile devices, which is what many protesters use), you also have the fact that this is very much a "silent" form of censorship.
Someone has a major case of "I didn't read TFA." Relevant quote:
If Twitter does remove a tweet, users in the country in which it was removed will see a grayed-out tweet in their timeline that says a message from an identified user has been withheld.
This is the exact opposite of "silent" censorship as you seem to mean it. The users know something was blocked, and it sounds like they know who sent it.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
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.
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.
Agreed. Twitter is taking a strong stance against censorship today and providing a checks-and-balances approach to censorship. They are containing censorship, rather than allowing global blackouts. They're actively tracking censorship and then routing around it. There is wide spread misunderstanding here.