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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.
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
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."
"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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