Turkey imposes advertising bans on Twitter, Periscope and Pinterest
reuters.com
reuters.com
That’s said, the primary use is expected to be control of journalism on Youtube.
After Erdogan took over almost all of the media, many of the fired journalists started Youtube channels and got more popular than the media Erdogan has a hold on.
He now wants to impose the same controls that he has over TV channels. The body responsible is called RTUK and recently got regulatory powers over internet broadcasting too. It infamously fines TV channels that are not friendly enough to Erdogan at the smallest mistake and turning blind eye on pro-Erdogan channels. This is because, the fines need to go through the committee in which Erdogan holds the majority.
To what extent you might ask? Well, there’s a talk show host on the TV who got destroyed for having a guest who said “let’s save the kids” when talking about governments dealings with the Kurds and there’s a TV channel who got a slap on the wrist after a public outcry for hosting commentators asking people to keep arms at home and identify potential targets among their neighbours who might be Erdogan’s political rivals.
The double standards are off the charts. Youtube is probably becoming Erdogan’s double standards enforcer.Everything is going to be legal, of course.
If youtube doesn’t behave, more fines will come. The government would usually turn a blind eye to some practices in the industry and will slap fines to those who are not in line. Turkey has strong as GDPR personal information protection laws, probably a land mine field for ad-agencies and that’s how they will get their fines I would guess.
Moral of the story: Power currupts.
Turkish government's intention here is getting content that criticise them removed, by asking to representative in Turkey who by the way must be a Turkish citizen, not just a person from any nationality who can speak Turkish. So that, they can apply Turkish law to this person if they would like to. If Youtube doesn't remove the content, possibly as they did with TV they are going to fine them.
I don't see this model working for long time and expecting most of the companies to pull their representatives soon, if they open the door of every country getting content removed however they like, I'm sure there will be other countries who would want that and it would be terrible for freedom of speech.
If I remember correctly, a lot of violence and multiple revolutions happened with the help of Twitter and YouTube all over the world. As long as violence is not in the US, it does not count, I suppose. That was probably what GP meant by saying "double standards".
That's both optimistic and naive given that TOS can change at any time, and interpretation aren't subject to appeal with a transparent process.
My point is there is no secret agenda to bring up a content that supports one view. What Turkish gov wants to achieve is that, taking down the content they don't like. They have taken over all mainstream TV channels and you wouldn't see a line of critic on any channel, if you do it's quite likely you will not be invited to debate next time.
Where is the line here? If I live in US and Tweet in Turkish, if Turkish gov ask for removal of that content should it be removed? Or should companies be required to share information about this user?
If I write that in another language, that local gov don't like, does it give Turkish gov right to get that removed?
Maybe. How a global communication network should interact with local laws and customs is in many aspects still an open problem that we just have begun to tackle.
> If I live in US and Tweet in Turkish, if Turkish gov ask for removal of that content should it be removed? Or should companies be required to share information about this user?
Welcome in a globalized world. I hope this won't be the eventual outcome, but this is definitly not a trivial question to answer. This stuff is why we have international organisations like the UN etc.
If you are beyond this limit, you are required to have a representative or the bandwidth limitations are applied and fines start to accumulate. If you don’t intend to do business in Turkey, you just go on with your business and loose that market.
Oh, btw, it’s likely that they will request global content removal. If I recall correctly Youtube or Wikipedia was blocked for years because of this.
won't twitter censor my tweets for hate speech,?
github and gitlab are US companies and censored projects only for the owner being iranian
Note that tech companies can change the terms of service at arbitrary points in time after you joined the service. You're of course free to reject the updated terms of service, in which case they will - wait for it - block you.
The part with "in union" is not really explained by ML models. These de-platforming actions are done manually and apparently one-sided.
Just for fun you can look up why Trump was banned on Twitter and see Khamenei's worst tweets from months prior, that were still up a week ago or so (nevermind him being banned). You find tons of those examples.
Also the TOS does not matter.
“The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!”
“To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th.”
I don't see any violence in those tweets and I don't understand what kind of person could classify those tweets as a violent ones. I guess only kind of person who wanted to ban him for anything.
If a company banned me from saying x, I can in theory go to another platform and say the same thing. Failing that, I can build my own site. There are a handful of things I can do to say x. Failing a digital platform, I can always go out on the street and say it. The police won't stop me.
If a government does the same, they have the power to prevent me from saying such a thing on all platforms, but worse, I can't even go out on the streets to say it, because I can get arrested. I could face maximum prison times, or worse, in some countries I could face the death penalty.
There is a huge difference.
The ideal scenario is that there is a free market of social media who can do whatever moderation they want. But we witnessed a serious blow to the idea thats even possible recently.
I am witnessing the reality that it’s never been easier and cheaper in the history of the world to reach almost everyone in the world within seconds.
It’s extremely easy to build a website, host it, have people type in a few letters and numbers, and “reach” each other. It’s never been easier, or cheaper. It’s as free market as it gets.
Insufficient amount of people may be interested in that, but that has nothing to do with the mechanisms in place that can allow you to reach people, which don’t need to include Amazon, Google, or any other host.
Only as long you don't have the wrong opinion.
> It’s extremely easy to build a website, host it, have people type in a few letters and numbers, and “reach” each other. It’s never been easier, or cheaper. It’s as free market as it gets.
And where do you find it? Google? Also the witch-hunt doesn't stop there. Next up is the hosting (looking at Parler). I can't wait to see when registrars are next and you have to type in a dynamic IP given by the ISP. But everyone could reach you, they just have to know the IP. If that really would be viable ISP would be the next logical step in the witch-hunt.
With "wrong opinion" do you mean inciting hatred and violence, and spreading misinformation?
Because by that logic, we should also allow ISIS, Al-Qaeda et al. to do their thing.
Outside of these "wrong" opinions, parent commenter is pretty accurate. I've seen and heard of people launching a website in less than a day.
Let's not forget that freedom of speech does not give you freedom from consequences. AWS, Twitter, Google, Apple and everyone else has no obligation to give you a platform, especially when it looks bad on them, or it goes against their ahem morals (or rather: the employee's morals). Just like I, as an equal citizen, have no reason to hear you out or to spread your message, if I don't like your message.
Hey, how about you show me where Parler incited violence or where Trump did that. I don't care about buzzwords like misinformation or hatred - Twitter cares neither - but I do care about inciting violence.
In exchange I show you tweets from Khamanei - ayatollah of Iran.
> Because by that logic, we should also allow ISIS, Al-Qaeda et al. to do their thing.
ISIS/Al-Qaeda/Al-Nusra/Taliban whatever are terrorist groups; they don't only incite violence. Also putting misinformation and hatred in the same category as actual terror groups is really not wise.
Then please go ahead and build a website, make a statement on it and have, say, some 2 billion people read the statement.
That's just a fraction of the world's population, so it shouldn't be too hard. I'll wait.
Bht the fact is, never in history has it been easier and cheaper to be ABLE to reach 2 billion people.
You don’t need thousands of employees, printing presses, lawyers and companies in multiple countries. You don’t even need to know different language. A single person has the ability to sit at their desk and make their ideas available to everyone that has access to the internet.
IMO, forcing platforms to host content they disagree with is a free speech issue in the other direction.
How do you figure? I don't know a person who believes that Twitter endorses all content that is found on Twitter. How is it a speech issue in the other direction when Twitter is not saying anything?
Further, about broadcast media, the US still has the equal time rule [0] and used to have a fairness doctrine which required broadcasters to present both sides of a debate [1]. It's worth mentioning that when the FCC (all Reagan appointees) removed the fairness doctrine, Congress acted to enshrine it in law and it was vetoed by Regan.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal-time_rule [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine
Banning someone or something is them saying something. Endorsement of the debate between different political views doesn’t mean allowing every idea to be acceptable. Letting say the anti vaccination people on your site directly means more disease risk to the general population. However, realizing that doesn’t require you to act. You might decide that’s acceptable where allowing say militant groups planning an insurrection aren’t.
In other words, voluntarily not saying something doesn’t give up your right to free speech.
I am not so certain of this any more. I believe that power shows those that are corrupt; the problem is that the set of corrupt men, and the set of those who wish for power, is virtually the same set.
There have very much been incorruptible men in history who were given great power, but in all cases that I know they did not seek it out, but rather were forced into it.
each nations (and/or state) has their own ethics that think it must be enforced
americans would think a state that jail for blasphemy a tyranny, while america itself jail for antisemitism, racism (and this one really depends!) and terrorism propaganda, while america backed fighters in foreign countries can be entitled (rebels) instead if terrorists only if they are "US-certified terrorists" and because american media can shout louder.
For social media, I don't see how this can be solves without federation of 3rd party moderation/filtering of some sort. We should let the users decide who should filter their content.
And no, a ban from Twitter does not prevent a person from expressing themselves on the Internet, even if it changes how one attracts an audience. The Internet does not exist independent of physical space -- if you want to get a message out, you absolutely can, even if all of Silicon Valley tries to stop you.
This is lazy thinking, and I'm honestly getting tired of reading it, so please forgive my frustration.
We have a term for this already: the chilling effect.
Stop lying, you know better.
You are being either disingenuous or fundamentally misunderstand what a right to speech is (namely, it is not a right to be heard, only a right to speak freely).
Additionally, you are forgetting that the Internet does not exist independent of physical reality. There are plenty of ways to get attention in physical reality that directly translate to traffic to your voice on the Internet.
And just a tip - leave out the “you know you’re wrong, you know you’re lying” comments. They’re unnecessary, condescending, and don’t help your argument.
Proximity on the Internet matters if you're trying to start the next Twitter. It does not matter if you're trying to exercise your right to freely speak. There are plenty of ways in which you can make your voice very vocally heard that don't involve the Internet at all.
To put it another way, you don't have to advertise an Internet location exclusively on the Internet. In fact, you have no right to advertisement or audience on the Internet at all.
Yes, clearly places like Speaker’s Corner exist in real life. That is not up for debate. The issue is that an extremely small amount of American corporations are allowed to decide what is deemed acceptable to discuss online. If deemed unacceptable, you are relegated to the outskirts and often denied access to say, credit. (This has actually happened.) Do you not see the issue with this?
It’s precisely like my city center example. Yes, in literal terms you are free to start your restaurant outside the city. No one is preventing you. In practical, real life terms that actually affect real culture, it absolutely matters. Especially when you decide to exile so many people outside the city that they become radicalized and start attacking you. Creating more echo chambers doesn’t help anyone.
This is simply not true. This is not what's happening, and again I am trying to understand a reason why you think this is the case.
"If deemed unacceptable, you are relegated to the outskirts and often denied access to say, credit."
I'm sorry again, but this is also not only untrue, but betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of how the Internet works. Any Internet accessible website is accessible from any browser at any time from anywhere in the world (excepting actual censorship taking place in some countries, e.g. the Great Firewall of China). This is what your "freedom of expression" guarantees, not access to the popular pages on the Internet.
The city center example is completely wrong because it imposes a false difficulty at visiting a restaurant outside of the city center that the restaurant cannot overcome. This is precisely the opposite of true, since any browser in the world can visit any Internet accessible website with the same level of effort. Your restaurant can still be walked into at an instant, anywhere in the world. Accessibility is a fixed value, and it's nearly zero.
Discovery of your speech is not a human right, however. I'm sorry if that violates your expectations, but it's true. You aren't guaranteed a right to be heard, only a right to speak, and on the Internet you will always have that right, again due to how the Internet works. It's a global network of interconnected computers, there will always be a place to express your thoughts and provide them to the world, one URL away.
I'm trying to give this more thought as our argument gets longer, as per HN guidelines, but I'm having a hard time keeping that goal clear. I would appreciate it if you tried to meet me somewhere in the middle here, to try and understand why I'm explaining things the way that I am.
That isn’t the point. The point is that free speech is both law and culture. Clinging to the notions of what is “legal free speech” is ignoring the cultural consequences of restricting it. Society is not a computer program that runs on laws.
When Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Google, and Apple all decide that you shall not be heard, you’re locked out from the 99.99% of the population that has zero understanding of how to access things via the URL bar. Remember that a huge portion of people just type in “Facebook” on Google and click the first link. Facebook itself is “the Internet” to billions of people. The percentage of people that are capable of setting up their own server and website is quite small.
Maybe this seems academic to Americans, but these same social media companies actively encouraged the uprisings in the Middle East a decade ago. Do you understand that if they had instead said, “Nah, we are banning this”, political opposition would have been essentially impossible, because the average person can use Facebook and Twitter but sure as hell isn't going to type in some obscure URL and organize a protest that way.
This is not about the letter of the law or how the internet works. It’s about democratizing technology so that the people have a fighting chance against those with power.
Yeah, I know, it's like Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) recently said on Fox News: Republicans literally have no way to get messages out now.
Except...
If the top 5 companies that dominate the Internet and technology ban you, yes, that locks you off from the overwhelming majority of the population.
That wasn’t even my point, which you seemed to either not understand or not care about. Nonetheless, yes, the conversation is over.
Wow. Fear ushers in tyranny, for sure.
It's never the country that has this power. It's particular government bodies.
edit: tone down my own opinion bc toyg is right in their critique
Please take this as a honest suggestion, without any criticism meant: it's easier to persuade people if you limit the display of bias. By simply rewording that as "times of the attempted coup," you remain an objective observer and carry more authority from the reader's perspective.
This said, I know it's difficult and that things are tough when it comes to Turkey. Hopefully things will get better at some point, nobody lives forever.
The law passed months ago and all major providers are given notice last year. Any social media provider, local or foreign, with at least 1M daily user activity is required to assign a legal representative in Turkey now. Internet bandwith of non-obliging companies will be reduced up to 95% incrementally.
Until recently, most social networks including Facebook were silent to this request. They now have representatives as well, alongside Microsoft and a few others.
Or, just some invented number, adjusted according to Erdoğan's political requirements?
It says "the social network provider's band width to be reduced by ...%"
I'm not a law expert but my guess is that they will send order letters to the ISP's and the ISP's will act the way they see fit. If Erdogan is not impressed, they will give the CEO's a call to improve the bandwidth reduction. If they don't comply, they will have hard time getting the permits to install cables or win government contracts, so they will comply.
When a website is blocked in Turkey, it's up to ISP's to choose the blocking method. Some ISP's blocks are stronger than others(some simply block DNS and you are not affected if you use GoogleDNS or OpenDNS etc. others block the IP so your only recourse is to use VPN). Also, some websites are more blocked than the others(On the same ISP you can have some websites IP blocked, others DNS only).
I think the best scenario for Turkey would be Facebook and Google deciding to pull out their representatives from Turkey.
Legally the next step of Turkey would be to block %90 percent of the traffic. Which would be equal to blocking these sites.
There is a lot of AKP/Erdoğan supporters that use these services. This would weaken Erdoğan further.
Most educated people in Turkey do/can use a VPN anyways. Only Erdoğan supporters, which are known to have less/none education (big surprise) would be effected from this.
You would really be surprised for how many something as simple as “I accidentally removed my bookmarks bar in my web browser, how do I get it back?” is a test that separates the men from the boys. — dare I say that over half of mankind would fail this simple test.
They also had something called url blocking which was intercepting http packages. Not used anymore because of wide adoption of ssl.
How many Turks, or people at all, do you know with an i.q. of 100?
There are a great many essential operations that people pay a professional to do all the time, even though it be quite easy to do on one's own.
I'm not defending the AKP, but painting all of them as rednecks is a huge mistake.
Such a shortsighted move, and yet even on HN we have people thinking it was justified. Frankly, I am very disappointed. We need a revival of late 90s “information should be free” values, and fast.
Not just dictators. You think EU is going to let American social companies dictate which of their citizens and representatives (!!!) can and cannot have access to what become a standard mass communication channel (i.e. what social media became)? Hell no. They may hate Trump, but they weren't fans of Trump's Twitter/Facebook ban and they sure as hell won't let Jack effin Dorsey be their arbiter of free speech.
(I know, I know, I'm looking for technical solutions to a social problem...)
i am saying stuff like this will continue to happen. even the assault against parler has shown such censorship can come in many forms and like it or not, it will happen everywhere https://www.greaterkashmir.com/news/business/4g-suspension-5...
At some point that and the access it gives US intelligence agencies to the population has to become a national security issue. China's policy of locking US companies out of the Chinese market looks prudent in hindsight.
Exactly. I mean, depending on their market penetration, social media platforms are not just a mirror but an active tool for analysis and influence of people's opinions. Age groups, clicks, hash tags, links, time of posting, etc. Why on Earth would governments leave such power in the hands of the free enterprise? Even in the West this just seems bizarre to me.
I think the days of internationally available social media platforms are numbered. Enterprises like Twitter, Facebook and Google will either concede to selected rules crafted by governments, authoritarian or not, or just get blocked from operating in their markets.
Those who have heavily invested in social media are soon to be in for an unpleasant surprise.
About social media, I think it's mostly a generational issue in governance. Those generations in power are still very little informed about the immense power of social media and are only now beginning to see its effects.
The congress hearings of Zuckerberg, Doursey and Pichai, and the kind of questions being asked there seem to point in that direction.
Needless to say, regulation isn't quite in the best interest of intelligence orgs. More so on the West that is.
[0]: https://www.resmigazete.gov.tr/ilanlar/eskiilanlar/2021/01/2...
TURKTRUST (The company that did this) is still a trust authority.
Twitter is a revolution-causing technology. We were all bigging this up in 2011 when protestors in Tahrir Square overthrew the military government of Egypt demanding a less repressive one.
Unfortunately fewer people paid attention to the followup: the subsequent (apparently free and fair) elections were won by the Islamist party, who immediately tried to impose an Islamist constitution that was in many ways even more repressive. That led to a coup again, effectively going back to a military dictatorship. How it's going now: https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2020/country-chapters/egypt
Merely having free speech and free elections is not enough to ensure that people don't elect a repressive government. The liberal values need to be more widely embedded in the society, and more work needs to be done to counter propaganda and the inevitable racism and religious bigotry and supremacism that leads to unfree governments.
It has also been very convenient for the West to not pay attention to Turkey during the Syria crisis, while they engage in what look like proxy actions on our behalf against Syrian and Russian (and unfortunately Kurdish) forces. And host something like three million refugees.
The article doesn't mention any relation but the timing seems to suggest it could be related
Netflix had to cancel the production of a Turkish TV show for having a gay character in the lead and remove content that the government doesn't like.
This is happening to Twitter, Youtube etc. now because the time given for them to comply ran out.
Remember Wikipedia was blocked because Tayipp's page was painted honestly, which he found to be very unflattering, and because Wikimedia refused to remove references to the recorded/leaked conversations about money laundering with his (Berkeley-educated) nitwit song Bilal (There is a saying here when somebody does not understand what you are saying: "Explain it as if you are explaining it to Bilal".
This is also why soundcloud was blocked for 3 years, because people used it to post the recordings of him telling Bilal to remove all of the cash from the family houses in case they were searched.
Let's hope the West doesn't try to catch up as well.
this is going to happen to turkey too... people going full vpn, then govt banning vpn, then using shit like kazhakistan certificate thing and before you know it, full on china GFW.