Twitter suspends the account of Venezuela's new National Assembly
twitter.com
twitter.com
The ideal scenario would be for people to use the web as how it was originally intended: ie, everyone having custom websites (and private emails) hosted on a VPS with an RSS feed so that your friends can follow your "feed". That way you'd own your content and wouldn't have to worry about censorships/account bans etc.
Discover-ability is just about the only downside with this.
That should not be.
But it is a freedom of speech issue because Twitter is a monopoly/gatekeeper. That's what needs fixing.
Regrading credit card processors, I don't see why it'd be necessary for a personal website. If it's about accepting donations, one could accept cryptocurrency.
Besides, when there's sufficient demand, there'd be several more options for hosting, including ones that are "pro free speech". OTOH, monopolies could end up destroying individual liberty and choice.
You'll have to had external backups, I know lot of people are just using their hosting provider backup services.
There can be several more options for hosting (just as there's other options for a Twitter-like platform), but eventually, instead of harassing the host to suspend them, the upstream provider could be harassed to suspend the host itself. And you don't have as much choice when it comes to Tier-1 ISPs.
Why would any other country use it now?
No doubt this will lead to countries leaving Twitter and making their own. Indeed at least Germany, France[1] and Mexico[2] realize the problem.
1. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-11/merkel-se...
2. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-mexico/mexic...
For the same reason people were using it before. Everyone is on Twitter. A much, much smaller fraction are on Twitter-alternatives.
That said, I wish them the best of luck, as I hope alternatives are able to succeed in the near future.
The point is that a lot of media people is, and posting there gets you exposure. But as this group of people is much smaller than your proverbial "everyone", moving them off Twitter is a much easier affair.
I have often thought about what would happen if a small number of very high profile Twitter users with a wide reach to various different groups decided to set up their own servers (Mastodon perhaps) and asked their followers to go there. How many such high-profile users would you need before Twitter's momentum completely stops? I argue that that number is very small.
https://hntrending.com/domains/year/index.html
Seems to be the same for HN, though my guess is that Twitter's rise in HN exposure is due to the BLM protests, the Capitol incident, and Trump.
> How many such high-profile users would you need before Twitter's momentum completely stops? I argue that that number is very small.
Microsoft made that bet, and got Twitch's top 2 streamers on to their platform (Mixer), but it still died within a year.
There's a chicken-and-the-egg problem here. High-profile users have no financial incentive to move to a smaller platform. Maybe a platform that isn't as expensive as livestreaming, backed by someone as huge as Microsoft, could sign enough contracts to break the barrier of the network effect.
Another solution would be upending social media's toxic money-maker: blackbox algorithms for targeted ads. That'll give the decentralized Fediverse model a chance. We did see Gab fall under too much server strain, but it's essentially a centralized version of Mastodon.
Mastodon is a quite heavy application and it's arguable that it was never really designed for high-volume traffic (it's supposed to be decentralised after all). Also, I believe Twitter had a lot of performance issues and it took them years to fix that, despite having a ridiculous amount of money available to them.
Gab could easily have embraced federation (but, I presume, only with like-minded instances since no decent instances would want to federate with them) but they decided they wanted to be another Twitter, but without the resources of Twitter.
You’re really not making the point you think you are making.
But i guess, private company and all that, doesn't matter if what they're doing aligns completely with US military interests or so the argument goes.
As far as I can tell, the group you're calling the "legitimately elected government" is that of the tin pot dictator that's run Venezuela into the ground and ran a sham election to cement its power:
https://apnews.com/article/venezuela-congress-socialists-con...:
> Maduro’s allies swept legislative elections last month boycotted by the opposition and denounced as a sham by the U.S., the European Union and several other foreign governments. While the vote was marred by anemically low turnout, it nonetheless seemed to relegate into irrelevancy the U.S.-backed opposition led by lawmaker Juan Guaidó.
The government there bribes voters with food handouts. Think of how bad things must be if you can be bribed with food:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-55211149:
> The government may now be in control of the National Assembly but the low turnout was hardly a "win".
> Sure, there were people who cast their vote, some still clinging to the man in power, others citing their democratic right as well as many more fearful of repercussions like losing food handouts if they didn't.
> But for the most part, there's an atmosphere of resignation. Most Venezuelans I've spoken to this past week saw little point in these elections and decided there were better things to be doing on Sunday.
> The vast queues at petrol stations rather than the polling stations explain what you need to know about politics here - that Venezuelans just want to survive another day and for politics to just go away.
If there are food or petrol shortages in Venezuela, it's due to American economic warfare, not Maduro.
This Abby Martin?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abby_Martin:
> She hosted Breaking the Set on the Russian network RT America from 2012 to 2015. In 2015, Martin launched the investigative documentary and interview series The Empire Files, originally hosted by Telesur....
> In 2008, Martin was part of the 9/11 Truth movement,[9][10][11][12][13] starting her own 9/11 Truther group in San Diego.[14][15] In a 2008 video of a 9/11 truth movement demonstration, she said: "I’ve researched it for three years and every single thing that I uncover solidifies my belief that it was an inside job and that our government was complicit in what happened."[16]
My understanding is Telesur is basically a Venezuelan-run RT clone. It's considered extremely unreliable by Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Per...:
> Telesur was deprecated in the 2019 RfC, which showed consensus that the TV channel is a Bolivarian propaganda outlet. Many editors state that Telesur publishes false information.
BTW, Wikipedia considers MintPress News to be unreliable because it "publishes false or fabricated information":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Per...
Yes america believing it has the right to interfere anywhere in the world and police other countries to put in governments sympathetic to US interests is a problem. At least to everyone outside the US anyway.
I'm not so sure about "everyone." Also, this principle of noninterference you seem to advocate is morally bankrupt, at least when taken to the extreme you seem to take it. Some very shitty, powerful people find noninterference in their affairs to be a very useful concept, and I deny they have any right to that. That's not to say interference is always justified or always done for good reasons, but it's definitely a valid option on the table.
>Also, this principle of noninterference you seem to advocate is morally bankrupt,
Well let's look back at some recent history of interference by america. They interfered in the middle east so they could take out the Taliban they trained and armed during the 80's and secure oil.pipelines between the middle east and Russia. This was continued into Libya and Syria using another us backed terrorist group, Isis.
Let's go back a little further to the gulf war where a complete and total fabrication led america to interfere in the middle east.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nayirah_testimony
Maybe we can go back to Jamaica in the early 70's and discuss how america armed the political party opposed to Jamaican independence and flooded the country with guns turning it into what essentially became a warzone throughout the 70's and 80's.
Maybe Columbia where the cia backed a government that supported their clandestine cocaine operations responsible for the crack epidemic in poor urban america?
When has America's interference in other countries benefitted anyone other than american corporations and american interests?
If america really cared about about dealing with morally bankrupt countries and governments, why do they ally themselves with Saudi Arabia and other countries well known for human rights abuses? Why do they arm and train terrorist groups?
You know there's a lot more context there, right? Also, if you start a fire for one reason (e.g. to cook a meal), it's not like you have to stand by that fire to the bitter end, and cannot put it out if it starts to burn down your house.
> Let's go back a little further to the gulf war where a complete and total fabrication led america to interfere in the middle east.
> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nayirah_testimony
Was the Iraqi invasion and annexation of Kuwait also fabricated? Because that set things before well before that testimony. Have you looked at the dates?
From your link:
> The Nayirah testimony was a false testimony given before the United States Congressional Human Rights Caucus on October 10, 1990...
Other parts of the article indicate similar allegations were circulating in September 1990.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_War:
> The US administration had at first been indecisive with an "undertone ... of resignation to the invasion and even adaptation to it as a fait accompli" until the UK's prime minister Margaret Thatcher played a powerful role, reminding the President that appeasement in the 1930s had led to war, that Saddam would have the whole Gulf at his mercy along with 65 percent of the world's oil supply, and famously urging President Bush "not to go wobbly".[30]
> Once persuaded, US officials insisted on a total Iraqi pullout from Kuwait, without any linkage to other Middle Eastern problems, accepting the British view that any concessions would strengthen Iraqi influence in the region for years to come.[82]
The citations for those last two paragraphs indicate that happen in August 1990.
> If america really cared about about dealing with morally bankrupt countries and governments, why do they ally themselves with Saudi Arabia and other countries well known for human rights abuses? Why do they arm and train terrorist groups?
Because, unfortunately, the world is not so simple and neat. It's complex and ugly. Why did the US ally with the Soviets to defeat the Nazis, when the Soviet system was probably only slightly less evil than the Nazi one? Do you think the US should instead have allied with the Nazis against the Soviets, or maybe just sat the whole thing out and let the Nazis keep Western Europe?
automated suspensions due to reports, which can be appealed
irrevocable suspensions at the discretion of twitter staff
I suspect this is the former. If an account gets enough reports, twitter's algos will automatically suspend it. The account owner then has the option to appeal it.
A medium where you can't communicate with your (political) adversaries has greatly reduced value even less relevance.
It's also kind of boring.
I think that is how it could be interpreted by someone that only knows Habbo for that.
They went as far as completely disabling the ability to chat for a week.
Any policy in the middle of the slippery-slope is not stable. Political alliances are easiest to form advocating either side of it.
In this case there are few people who want Trump banned but think banning Venezuela's National Assembly is a step too far.
There was no legitimate election. The Lima Group (practically every country in America - North and South), the EU, and indeed the UN say it's not legitimate. Some random person on twitter says it is.
Twitter has been banning Maduro backed accounts for years, to try to link this into the recent fair and transparent US elections and the removal of ex-president Trump from twitter is desparate
Otherwise Twitter is interfering in foreign diplomacy and governments, be they legal, illegal, authoritarian or democratic.
Twitter should not be making these calls. This is a decision for the State Department to make.
> Twitter should not be making these calls.
Twitter should totally should be making the calls. If the CCP wants to put a big propaganda poster in my front yard "for diplomatic reasons," I'd tell them to fuck off. Neither I nor Twitter have any obligation to carry the messages of any regime.
If they want to do diplomacy, they can send a representative to the State Department. If their government wants to communicate, let it use mechanisms it actually controls.
I disagree with that strongly. If it was the State Department's decision, I'd have to host the CCP's propaganda in my yard until State Department told me to take it down.
Twitter isn't interfering with government-to-government diplomacy, so there's no diplomatic issue here.
Is that a controversial opinion?
Can Twitter ban members of protected classes if they don’t ban all members of a protected class, can the coffee shop do the same?
And being a member of a protected class doesn't mean you can't be banned for terms of service violations. You are just throwing legal sounding words together like a random word generator.
This is giving Twitter way too much credit (and too much power). When did a stupid 280chr “microblogging” platform become a channel for foreign diplomacy? To make an absurd comparison, should we consider the politics subreddit a diplomatic venue too?
Approximately in 2009. That's the date of the first known public example of the State Department influencing Twitter operations for diplomatic purposes. In that case, it was to lobby Twitter to delay a scheduled shutdown because of events happening in Iran.
> To make an absurd comparison, should we consider the politics subreddit a diplomatic venue too?
Any highly trafficked site co-ordinated and administered in the United States is, yes.
This is basically whining about the actions of mods on a free web forum.
Maybe governments shouldn't be using some poorly run private sector web site to communicate with the public.
FWIW, I think you are confusing what is legally permissible today with the normative statement by GP that Twitter shouldn't be the one making these calls.
People need to stop acting like Twitter is supposed to act as an organ of the US government.
The entire point of section 230 is to enable editorial control so long as you aren't the content creator/submitter without the kinds of civil liability tied to “publisher” status otherwise, for both platforms and users on those platforms who are empowered to act in ways which have editorial impact.
And a one-sentence “you can't do X and Y” isn't really a substantive argument against Section 230.
Your understanding is wrong. They receive liability protection for editorial decisions as a means of removing the disincentive for them to exercise editorial control that would otherwise exist.
If you walk into my bar and start screaming racist nonsense, I am well within my rights to ask you to leave the bar, and I do not have to let you back in. That doesn’t also suddenly make me liable for the nonsense you spewed.
The act of choosing to use (or not use) ones resources to relay speech is, yes, an act of free speech (or perhaps more precisely free press, though the two are generally treated as a single right under the name “speech” for most purpose).
> Twitter is not an editor
It is, except for some civil liability purposes because of the specific Section 230 carveout for curated/moderated content which is user generated, a publisher. The choice to publish content, or not, is a speech/press act.
It would be, except for Section 230’s explicitly carveout of most civil liability as a publisher for online publishers (whether other users or platform operators) to the extent they are moderating/curating user-generated content, rather than producing/submitting content.
Nope, publishers often (sometimes with explicit notice to avoid doubt) publish things they disagree with because they think there is value in publishing it. They often also exercise their free speech/press rights to not publish other things they disagree with, even if they are submitted to them for publication.
The prudent thing for Venezuela is to get together with a few other countries and jointly block Twitface.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/12/section-230-good-actua...
Protocols over platforms. Get to a critical mass in a blogging protocol such that posts can be shared between platforms and apps that each moderate, or don't, according to their own needs.
The power of Twitter is in their silo. When enough of us de-silo they lose their power.
Remember: Twitter bent over backwards to make exceptions to their own rules to keep Donald Trump and Donald Trump alone on their platform. Hell, they even exempted him from their repeat infringer policy that the DMCA mandates they have. If January 6th hadn't happened, he'd still be tweeting, and Twitter would still be coming up with new policies and arguments for why Donald Trump should remain on their platform.
The only way to truly protect the rights of the individual would be for the government to step in at this moment to put big tech in it's place. Unfortunately I have very little confidence that it'd actually happen. Esp since the newly elected government in the US seems firmly on the side of big tech (political contributions and what not).
Failing government intervention, I fear a technological dystopia is not too far away in the future, if not already here. The other alternative ofc would be for individuals to take back control by moving out of these platforms towards their own personal websites with custom email and RSS feeds.
Heres the thing, what if Biden decides to strengthen consumer privacy rights? Who will lose the most out of it? The same folks who are now controlling popular narrative. "You dont want to end up like Trump, do you?" Think about that. How hard is it for them to propagate anti-Biden rhetoric now? Twitter has free reign of changing people's opinion by Twitter declaring what is true and what is disinformation.
The best thing I could see going forward would be a legal requirement for online platforms that broadcast content to others to apply their moderation rules even-handedly. This could be effectuated by either banning ToS terms that allow arbitrary and capricious moderation; or by reducing the scope of CDA 230 immunity to prohibit carve-outs for specific individuals, in the same way that DMCA 512 immunity goes away when you start rejecting legally valid counternotices or ignoring repeat infringers (which, BTW, they also did for Trump).
The duly elected government of a country is a different matter entirely.
Jack's world would be decentralized Twitter, Signal and Bitcoin. That's what he's pushing for and putting resources into.