Slashdot Mirror
Twitter Capitulates To Governments, Censors Users
An anonymous reader writes "Twitter made a public stance in 2011 to remain a platform for free speech, having helped fuel movements such as the Arab Spring. This past week, however, Twitter is shown to have complied with Russian government demands to block a pro-Ukrainian Twitter feed from reaching Russian citizens, with Turkish government demands that it remove content that the Turkish government wants removed, and with a Pakistani bureaucrat's request that content he considers blasphemous and unethical be censored in Pakistan. Given Twitter's role in the democratic uprisings of the past few years, what do these capitulations bode for future movements? Will other platforms take Twitter's place? Or is the importance to democracy of platforms such as Twitter overblown?"
Never again can you say on Twitter "Look, I'd had a lovely supper, and all I said to my wife was: That piece of halibut was good enough for Allah."
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
When your little boutique startup catches fire enough to go IPO and get listed on the NYSE, then you may have to make a few ethical and moral compromises to keep that Mercedes.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
more often than to promote uprising. in China theres a girl who got a year in a labor camp for a joke tweet she made.
the whole 'free speech' thing may have been a PR gimmick. twitter, like facebook, allows massive spying and encourages people to destroy their own privacy.
twitter is the illusion of free speech. the only really free speech is private speech, and there is no such thing as private electronic speech.
The problem is that everybody has been favoring curated communications services where it is all under control of one party, Facebook or Twitter say. When you do that you are at the mercy of what that party wants to allow.
That is contrary to the original intent of the internet to "route around censorship". Which it could still do.... if people didn't all flock to curated services.
This shouldn't surprise anyone. Wasn't there a case years ago where Yahoo helped Chinese authorities arrest a blogger?
Even the "Don't be evil" company would happily turn you to authorities if you happen to use their search engine to find out how to construct a homemade bomb (their "autocomplete/suggestion" feature isn't really your best friend), and it doesn't matter if you live in a 3rd world country or not, since a suspicion of terrorism is enough to have you detained indefinitely even in a "land of the free".
If you post as an AC, don't expect me to spend a mod point on you.
We have that; it's called XMPP.
The real problem is that centralized proprietary shit like Twitter and Facebook have marketing departments and open standards do not.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Are you serious? Usenet has existed since 1980.
USENET used to be a viable communications platform until it became Googlified. I pine for the days of Usenet and newsreaders unencumbered by web browsers, providing a means of sharing information, asking questions and receiving knowledgeable answers all from the comfort of my glowing green/blue/orange/red terminal.