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?"

Comments

twitter is probably used to imprison dissidents

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:It isn't designed as an uncensorable platform

[mrchaotica]

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.