Stop Silencing Critics from MiddleEast and NorthAfrica
accessnow.org
accessnow.org
Members of Congress asked that Quds News Network be removed. That one at least was not a Twitter driven action.
https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/04/twitter-suspends-accounts-...
Publishers are supposed to reject illegal state censorship, not embrace it.
What does history teach us about what companies have done in the past in similar situations? Was the outcome good?
I'm genuinely curious.
Besides informal relationships with the authorities, I don't see why they "have" to abide by any local law?
PS: Tunisia has internet transparency laws, so they can't go blocking Facebook (or any other website) at a whim.
I strongly agree with you on the idea that companies and people should only need to obey the laws of the countries they operate in, but you must recognize that this idea is not currently the status quo, is actually fairly radical, and is strongly opposed by a lot of very powerful governments, including the United States.
Kim Dotcom had servers in the US - in fact, nearly their entire server fleet if not entirely was in Virginia, vendors in the US, collected payment for illegal downloads and uploads in the US, in USD. Their primary domain was a .com, which is owned by Verisign, a US company.
This would likely not be the case if you were running on a ccTLD in your own country, hosted in your own country, at least.
If you are in Canada and hire somebody to rob a bank in the US, you have violated American law and can be extradited. This works in reverse too. If you are in the US and hire somebody to rob a bank in Canada, you have violated Canadian law and can be extradited.
>For example, see Kim Dotcom.
Poor example because Megaupload had a US nexus.
One question that I do think bears inspection is whether governments should offer assistance to companies mostly owned domestically that do business abroad. The US government could enter the fight on Facebook's behalf and force a better result. But that would require the USG to spend international political capital on behalf of the oppressed citizens of arbitrary foreign countries. It might be a better world if we did, but historically this has not been something we spend many resources on unless there is a geopolitical end that benefits us.
A last thought is that involving the USG is going to create a vastly unequal amount of pressure. Were going to have a lot of leverage over poor countries that depend on the US directly or indirectly for humanitarian aid, trade or military protection.
Just take a look at what has happened to Cuba since we tried to change them. Still Communist, but now they also have tons of humanitarian issues because they lack access to a close first world trading partner. The regimes also don't seem any less brutal.
I also hate that the USG leaning on a country usually makes the citizens miserable, not the government. Just as an example, dictator in Blahland says Facebook has to ban these 15 journalists. Facebook refuses, dictator blocks Facebook. USG steps in and demands that they unblock Facebook, or we withold humanitarian aid. The dictator says fine, it's not like he/she is going to starve. We withold aid, causing famine and instability in the region. At the end of that, are we really the good guys? The journalists still have no access, Facebook is still blocked, and now there's an escalating humanitarian crisis.
I'm not well versed in politics though, perhaps there are more surgical means to apply pressure.
It already happens, look at all the countries with peacekeeper forces such as Uruguay
What happened when a leader tried to move off the US Dollar and onto the gold standard for international trade? 4th generation warfare using social media to organize a civil war resulting in the execution of the leader.
What happened when a dictator tried to move off the US Dollar and onto the Euro for oil trade? Invaded in 2003 using a false pretense to delude the public in favor of supporting the initiative.
Surgical enough?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Nacchio
Not confirming nor refuting, and it's worth noting that the CenturyLink lines are now more than likely under bulk surveillance... but one wonders what things would be like if there were more people like Mark Klein and Joseph Nacchio and Ed Snowden.
Some blame must be assigned to thinking creatures who succumb to learned helplessness in the face of illegal orders.
It's another story in a country where there is weak rule of law, or where legal authority gives the government powers that we in the U.S. consider oppressive.
Should people be expected to object the local government and local laws, even if they seem unjust? Besides the fallacy of composition, what makes companies different from people?
People are expected (though not necessarily predicted) to do the moral thing.
> Besides the fallacy of composition, what makes companies different from people?
In their purest form, companies are basically AI entities made of people engineered to replace the human conscience with bare minimum legal compliance, in order to sociopathically pursue maximum shareholder value.
Should a company be expected to obey the local
government and local laws, even if they seem unjust?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Apartheid_Movement
The consensus then was 'boycott the nation.' I get the impression that, lately, it doesn't occur to people that a business walking away from money is even an option.
The big problem with the “cutting them off” strategy is: if it’s a dictatorship, the people may not push back for fear of death
As long as Facebook doesn't have employees or servers in that jurisdiction, it should ignore the laws of that jurisdiction. Let that country put up its own firewall.
What's probably happening here is that Twitter/FB/etc are afraid of that firewall threat. That's just spineless.
Doesn't need to be criminal, inconvenient is enough. Jamal Khashoggi's family should know.
I think the idea isn't so much a boycott specifically, but some kind of civil disobedience that specifically opposed to the improper law or regime.
> If Facebook gets an improper censorship demand from the Tunisian government and responds by cutting off Tunisia's Facebook access, aren't they just doing what the government wanted?
I agree. A more appropriate response would be to not comply, and make it clear that was intentional. That could even be amplified by taking deliberate steps to oppose such improper censorship.
Under WTO rules, Government of Tunisia would be able to ban FB at this point. I think the issue is that with every conceivable route, the process ends in GoT getting what GoT wants. Which is for Facebook to be gone.
Nitpick: "rule of law" doesn't mean "having laws" or "enforcing laws," it means everyone being subject to the same set of laws, including elites and the government itself.
Some countries without the rule of law, like the PRC, like to go on and on about the "rule of law" but mean something less:
https://www.justsecurity.org/58544/china-rule-law-cautionary...:
> Despite the Party’s current encouragement of “rule of law” and its celebration of the Constitution, Chinese rule of law—officially called “socialist rule of law with Chinese characteristics”—differs fundamentally from rule of law as internationally understood. To begin with, all aspiring Chinese lawyers—at least according to the study material for one bar exam preparation course—must commit to the belief that law is subject to the “leadership of the Party.” The same bar review material further states that the fundamental principle of Chinese rule of law is to “maintain the rule of the Party.” Meanwhile, a recent bar exam question affirmed that “Western Capitalist Rule of Law Thought” is not an “origin” of Chinese rule of law. Accordingly, rather than promote basic principles such as the supremacy of law, legal accountability, judicial independence, and fair treatment before the law, fazhi is instead used as a rhetorical tool to legitimize the Party’s rule. It is the Party’s will restated in seemingly neutral and distinctly legal language, which draws on a long imperial tradition of legal discourse while rejecting norms of transparency and impartiality. By evoking fazhi, the Party seeks to attain greater credibility, and in turn inspire greater compliance, by drawing on both the high prestige accorded to rule of law and the Chinese tradition of obedience to edicts of the ruler and the precedents of the dynasty (qianli 前例).
It comes to a particularly poignant moment at the top of the political structure, in the form of presidential pardons, many of them self-serving. (How their existence can be reconciled with claims about all men being equal under the law is mind-boggling.)
Rule of law is a sliding scale. Some countries have more of it, some have less of it, but from having lived in four of them, my observation is that none of them have enough of it. Violations of it simply manifest in different ways.
In the US that is not the case. Even in today's climate the Federal system does not have infinite reach into States ex. certification of 2020 vote. And there's yet broad independence and some institutional credibility e.g. Supreme court left.
However, it is applied inconsistently. The only recent decision out of SCOTUS that I think was seriously flawed was ACA: the imposition of a fee to have no health insurance was a tax. The court should have referred it back to the legislative branch for correction at its control. But even here, due process is broadly a real thing. I've also seen questionable court decisions in my personal life. I'm not enthused by the Citizen's United ruling either. However, the Congress has allowed and preferred less oversight on political speech.
In the large US corporations and the top 1% are not held accountable to the extent they should. (I am American). This broad trend started in the 2000s combined with Congress' lack of institutional credibility over the last 30 years to make a power vacuum. At the 1 million foot level, a person once argued power comes from tradition, or institutions, or personal. That vacuum that was filled by Trump's personal brand of power. Correct: his brand is no Steve Jobs, Buffet's, MLKs, or anything good. But it is power. Trump further eroded Washington's institutional power bringing it to a new low.
Wells Fargo opened up credit cards in client's names. After years of festering, the old CEO left because of this. But no criminal charges were filed. If you or I did that, I don't think we could run and hide or use shareholder cash for corporate lawyers to blunt the AG. Ditto the 2008 financial crisis: corporations got bailouts and did not face jail time under criminal convictions. These are examples of a widely complex systemic failure that probably shares blame in Congressional lobbying, corporation power, SEC failure to exact anything much more than lukewarm fines, and DOJ and State's failure to get the goods and bust the wrong doers. On top of this Congress has been no help. Another facet to this problem is the Stiglitz's observation that by defining corporation's mission as maximizing shareholder value, they have perversely come up with rhetoric that really serves to enrich themselves going a good way to explain the stupid difference between the bottom and top income rates. Further much their income is not W2 taxable, where it's hard to hide from the tax man.
Human law is not exact. Even in the most controlled, most precise, most repeatable processes e.g. statistically controlled manufacturing processes mainly in the realm of the electro-magnetic force ala condensed matter physics, there is standard deviation. And it's random. So we cannot bust the entire American system as fatally flawed because of a few bad outcomes at the personal, corporate, or country level.
Nevertheless the number of unjust outcomes where the law is more equitable to some, is a trend that's been notable, sustained, long, and extensively commented on. We know it stinks. And it's made worse socially and civilly with outsourcing to the far east and the two major political parties siding more and more with corporations. Rising healthcare costs, university costs hasn't helped either. Rising home costs associated with better K-12 schools is another big problem. Here we Americans need and deserve friendly fire: it would not kill us to rein in the excesses of money and lack of action against those with money to bring the pendulum back in the middle. And here we are stuck, flailing. It's pathetic.
Getting this back in the middle is not socialism, a repudiation of capitalism and the other variations on the same which are buttressed by vapid emotional outrage, and crap talking.
We know better: unlike the PRC there's plenty of outcry although true enough it's not translating into action. Unlike mathematics where the law of the excluded middle makes sense, we need the middle in human affairs. Perhaps the largest damage Trump has done and has further inflamed is removing the reasonable middle leaving two dumb options left over:
- go way left
- go way right
Both suck. It takes more brains, more backbone, a smarter mind, and better communication skills to keep things in balance than the bomb throwing, crap talking, lying that Trump is an expert in but which both political parties here are increasingly succumbing to. The middle in the vapid environment now looks like a cop-out to both sides. It's most definitely not.
In today's world of no pragmatic American common sense the only going currency is outrage, and talking about what we'll do in the next election e.g. in the perpetual future broad admission our institutions are lost. Do we really need to argue about who controls the paperwork for health insurance? Maybe one day. But what in the hell is the government doing today to get first and second derivative negative on health care costs? Does Congress need a balanced budget? No. We don't need a balanced budget amendment either. Running a 20-35% of GDP debt is OK. We're way north of 20% BTW ... But you can't get the morons in DC to see that closing the gap requires both MORE tax income and LESS expenditures. That requires competent management to set better priorities and a 15yr plan to right the ship. And for all the MBA's around here, we don't have it today.
Similar tactics against Israel resulted in laws against boycotts: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel_Anti-Boycott_Act
The vaunted Arab Spring in this plea had a pretty mixed outcome. Libya is a messs, Egypt ended up with another dictator after overthrowing a democratically elected organization (which the west didnt want, but was the only viable party after the same said west pushed for quick elections), and Syria ended up with a civil war, ISIS and same regime after every western and digital platform insisted for years that the regime was on its last legs.
The only platform that didn’t restrict Trump was twitter. Even (most of) Fox opposed him until it was clear he was going to mop up the primaries. He may be mainstream now, but the states and platforms have closed that loophole for now.
But what about more subtle cases like when IKEA removed all images in their Saudi version of their catalogue? That obviously didn't sit well with even IKEA.*
When does something become 'unjust' enough to not comply with local laws?
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/oct/02/ikea-apologise...
Banana republics are born from broken governments, which brings negative outcomes to the people. Governments that close off to the corporate world lack capital growth.
Companies don't spread values into other countries anymore than invading armies of yesteryear. The life and death that comes with corporate money is what it is. They may reveal underlying values and profit off them. Corps may discover certain business is not desired, but corporation values won't change the country.
The only values companies need to care about is the ones that will get them kicked out of their host country, or are shared worldwide.
So, ideally, companies should follow laws of governments they operate in.
But we have seen over and over through history that companies bring their values and disrupt the local culture.
He set himself on fire for having his fruit stand confiscated for the third time, for not having a license for it. He likely had no money to get a new fruit stand, and saw no way out except to commit suicide in protest.
I wish these so-called human rights activists named the oppression that drove Bouazizi to self-immolate, instead of glossing over it. He was driven to suicide because he had his right to engage in voluntary economic interactions with other consenting adults violated. This oppression was rationalized by the ideology that says the state has a right to use the threat of incarceration to control the private economic activity of individuals, and is one the human rights activists are silent about.
- Any moderation policy will anger someone
- Content moderation is inherently subjective
- Errors at scale result in many errors over time
Mike Masnick goes into this at depth here:
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20191111/23032743367/masni...
the three points above were taken from this video by Derek Caelin:
https://conf.tube/videos/watch/d8c8ed69-79f0-4987-bafe-84c01...
Since the centralized model is obviously broken, perhaps try the opposite approach?
https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/panel-grills-faceb...
Personally, I think Facebook, Twitter et al should never have regulated content and should have censored things only after a valid court order is received (from local jurisdictions). Everything else should have been the wild west
Why do you think it should be this way?
Of course, people will leave Twitter and Facebook as they become subpar and go to alternatives.
As soon as they started to editorialize the content, by having a black box that decides what to show you, they didn't have an alternative anymore. If they didn't censor it themselves, people would notice that it's those companies spreading lies, not small people.
Even pornhub had to regulate content eventually. I doubt the pornographic facebook would have achieved it's current market penetration ...
If you want to see what that is like, take a look at voat.co.
Wild west sties usually end up with three kinds of content.
1. Content about things that you'd also find on mainstream sites, and with decent user comments.
2. Content about things that you'd also find on mainstream sites, but the comments are full of talk about Jews and black people and gay people and the terrible things they have done to hide the truth about whatever the thread is about.
3. Rants about the need to take control back from the Jews and blacks etc, often by killing them all. All the usual insane conspiracy theories, although often spiced up with ties to Jews, blacks, etc that you don't see in the mainstream versions of those conspiracies.
#1 is usually low traffic. If you are interested in this stuff, the mainstream site will serve you far better.
#2 is often a decent amount of traffic. But if there are any useful comments they will be embedded among a bunch of the racist, antisemitic, anti-gay etc stuff. As with #1, you will probably find mainstream sites much more useful.
For an example of a #2 type discussion, see the comments to this voat.co /v/science [1] thread on pilot wave theory.
The end result almost inevitably is that the site ends up being only interesting to, and largely only populated by, those who are there for the racism, antisemitism, etc, or for the conspiracy theories.
There seems to be a dearth of those comments in this particular post. Fortunately.
It's usually by ideologically driven journalists/propagandists/political groups/activists/etc. You can see the political agenda behind the "X is a private company and free speech doesn't apply" comments.
This story doesn't seem to have the divisive culture war/agenda behind it hence the lack of those comments.
If bin Salman tells Trump I don't like this tweet Trump would rush to his office and threaten Twitter while letting his own family succumb.