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.
Trying to find out whose twitter feed is causing all the commotion, but no joy. It would seem entirely appropriate to simply retweet the tweets.
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
Flame wars with white supremacists, generally antagonising and goading friends, and enemies, on Usenet. Pointless navel gazing arguments about the nature of nothing and everything. Using rude words, racial epithets, the shout down, the noise... maybe even anarchy.
Now everyone seems to be out there busy judging everybody, involving the authorities and more.
Frankly, possibly unfairly, most of the peeps on the net in the early 90s and before understood it was the wild-west of communications... If someone was being a cunt you told them so. If it turned out to be you several folks would probably tell you. These folk were different - I guess, maybe, it went with the territory. It was new and the folks out there bleeding edgers.
It was no place for bruisable egos, political correctness et al - yet, to me, it felt right. People didn't get fired over righteous indignation from some pointless corner of the net. 140 character vomit was not front page news.
The media at large really think that one persons opinion on Twitter is worthy of news... in the old days it was just flotsam and jetsam... if they were being an arse they got called that and that was, usually, that. Either that or the media just see a cheap story in repeating someone's anally generated hyperbole.
*meh*
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
Twitter made a public stance in 2011 to remain a platform for free speech [snip] Or is the importance to democracy of platforms such as Twitter overblown?
There are two different things being discussed here, and it's important to keep them separate.
Free speech is a right, i.e., something that governments should not be able to restrict arbitrarily -- whether those governments are democratic, communist, monarchies, whatever.
Democracy is a form of government, and history has shown us that democracy is very capable of taking away rights, just like any other form of government. There is a reason that many philosophers from the ancient Greeks up to the Founders of the U.S. and beyond were afraid of "mob rule." When governmental policy is just determined by majority vote, there are plenty of times when the majority will vote away "fundamental rights" for various reasons (for example, to try to prevent some fear or threat to security).
Free speech is generally a necessary component to promote change in government -- whether that government is democratic or aristocratic or whatever. Thus, the fight for free speech should be about rights, regardless of the form of government. There are all sorts of "democratic" countries in the world who lack a lot of fundamental freedoms, including free speech. And, as recent history has shown us, simply "rebranding" a country as a "democracy" does NOT automatically make it "more free."
I'm pretty sure for Twitter this all boils down to money and investors and the usual capitalist bullshit, which seems kind of sad.
But it also seems predictable, because has public speech other than the soapbox in a park or printing your own newspaper ever been truly uncensored? Or has some kind of censorship always prevailed, whether it was relatively benign (and occasionally insidious) decorum, popularity/lack of popularity, commercial, or even the more onerous state/institutional imposed?
It'd be nice to see Twitter stand up against censorship, especially the particularly noxious kind imposed with a mixture of religious ignorance and state authority.
But I can't say I'm surprised at all.
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.
"The real problem is that centralized proprietary shit like Twitter and Facebook have marketing departments and open standards do not."
The real problem is that most people are affected by marketing. Their intellectual growth is stunted early for this very purpose, leaving them ignorant and vulnerable.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Huh ??
Google Groups is just an interface to Usenet. I suggest you search for slrn and use that or one of the other terminal clients if you want traditional Usenet access.
I'm an active Usenet poster and _all_ of my postings are done from a xterm/pterm using slrn.
Also, if you want access to Usenet outside of Google, then use Eternal September (which works just fine with slrn) and is my current Usenet access method of choice.
OTOH, I do agree with you about one thing - Google's web Usenet client does horrible things to Usenet postings, including double spacing them and not respecting the 72/80 column posting width conventions.
(Oh and BTW, on the latter, if Google Mail can format the plain text version of emails to stay within those limits, then Google Groups should bloody well use the same code for Usenet. :-()
Facebook did not start with a marketing department. It caught on because it delivered something people wanted and was easy to use. Same with twitter. They started making money and used the money to grow their product. The open source model does not follow that process. Getting angry and whining does not get you anywhere. To increase usage, you have to provide something people want and understand how to use. Saying "use xmpp" is not going to work. You need to say "use this cute app to chat with your friends anonymously" Leave the jargon out of it.
Currently hooked on AMP
I see your school taught you well.
"It isn't about being sheeple, it is about not being an expert."
It's about using 'I am not an expert' as a mantra to avoid thinking, actually.
Sure, you arent an expert. Guess what? You do not have to be an expert to know that the value of an offer has an *inverse* relationship to the amount of advertising you are bombarded with for it. A child can easily understand that. Yet people continue to buy what the TV tells them to buy, and as a result marketing people whose *only function* is to destroy language in order to lie more effectively continue to ply their trade in greater numbers than ever before. Young people who have the capacity to become productive members of society are in fact being directed to marketing instead.
"In the case of centralized messaging services, the overwhelming majority of users would not directly benefit from using some more decentralized."
Another anti-intellectual lesson the schools are obviously very good at teaching. Only consider direct immediate benefits! Keep that attention span very short and do not over-use your brain young man!
You dont need to be an expert or even really smart to understand that indirect effects are sometimes much more important than direct benefits.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
We have that; it's called XMPP. ... open standards ...
XMPP is almost as centralized as Twitter. You still communicate through a server that can be shut down. The only difference is that, if you lose access to one server, you can switch to another server, or start your own if you have enough money. (The other difference is that XMPP is not a broadcast medium.)
A proper uncensorable platform would be peer-to-peer. That's where IPv4's lack of true end-to-end connectivity has irritated me for years. There are attempts to work around this problem using, for example, BitTorrent's distributed hash table protocol or Bitcoin's blockchain or both or Onion routing. The problem is that there is no money in a truly peer-to-peer communications system, so development has always been slower than centralized systems.
Have a nice time.
Twitter's implementation of localized censorship is leaky by design. Users can specify in their settings what country they're in -- and that overrides any guess that Twitter might make about location from, say, IP address. So any Russian who wants to see what's missing -- after conveniently being alerted by Twitter that a given tweet is not accessible in that country -- can just switch to another country. Seems a pretty pragmatic move to prevent Twitter engineers from being arrested or money from being seized in a local jurisdiction while making tweets trivially available worldwide.