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Comment by mrtksn | Hacker News Reader

The expectation that a corporation operating in India will not obey Indian laws but American ones is appalling.

EU, Canada, China, Turkey or North Korea - if you want to do business there you have to respect their laws.

“For profit US corporation fighting foreign government atrocities” is a deeply flawed idea.

If Indians believe that they need wider free speech rights or other protections, they need to change their political figures and laws accordingly. It’s unreasonable to expect that a foreign corporation will do that for them, it even might be the case that they(the locals) don’t want it.

Imagine the other way around, Italian company selling Kinder Surprise Eggs in US, Swiss company doing banking by the Swiss laws in US, Malta company running gambling in the US by the Maltese laws. Would they be considered fighting the unreasonable food regulations, toppling the oppressive financial laws or pushing against tyrannical gambling laws of the US? I don’t think so.

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“For profit US corporation fighting foreign government atrocities”

I think that's a bit of an unfair phrasing. How about "Good people upholding their morals instead of dropping them at the door when they go to work"

I really am not a fan of how far we've taken the general image that 'business is business' and a bunch of regular morals are OK to toss out. We should preserve the social stigma we hold against people equally against companies.

I agree. IMHO, corporations must be hold morally accountable(whatever that is, locally). However, if the local morals say that "It's all about profits" or something permissive then they will operate in oppressive regimes. What I disagree with, is the expectation of enforcing US morals to other parts of the world. If we are going for the moral stance of "should not tolerate censorship", instead of expecting Twitter to "fight the oppressive Indian govt" , it's more reasonable to expect Twitter not doing business there.

So far, as we see with Apple, Twitter, FB, Palantir, Oracle, Cisco and many others, the Americans are fine with their businesses working with those governments.

Twitter allows posting of naked photos. I have no problems with this, but should a country's laws against pornography be ignored because "our morals are superior"?

I don't think it's valid to compare different pornography laws with a government censoring criticism. The former has very little societal significance, the latter is correlated with rather unpleasant state authoritarianism.

At the end of the day, this goes back to a debate that's been had here many times before, such as with Google's Dragonfly, which is that is Twitter doing more good being available in India with occasional censoring, or if it do more good if it wasn't available in India all.

I'm not siding one way or another, but it's not clear that taking down the platform as a whole is always a better solution than running a slightly censored one.

No. The U.S. 300 million citizen don’t have the monopoly on morals when 1 billion Indians have a different idea about them. So don’t be pretentious, adapt to local laws and let people figure out their own ideas about life. Maybe, just maybe, the U.S. has the wrong laws.

1 billion Indians aren't all supporters of government censorship of criticism.

If the US government enacted some ridiculous law, you would hope that US corporations would try to push back a bit, at least rhetorically, because you recognize that the state isn't its people. Why suddenly the different tone for India?

Plenty of countries in the world have a lax view on nudity, show it on TV, go to the beach naked, have a regulated sex work industry etc.

Yet, since almost all large platforms and payment processors are American, good luck posting photos of sand dunes because some algorithm at Facebook might confuse it with woman's breasts, and I don't see anyone pushing back.

Point being adapt to local laws and culture instead of pretending that a couple of thousand of unelected dudes in Silicon Valley should have any say in what's allowed in some country none of them stepped foot in.

> adapt to local laws and culture instead of pretending that a couple of thousand of unelected dudes in Silicon Valley should have any say

I think we might both agree there's a line beyond which even you would abandon this view.

We may just disagree on where that line should exist.

If the Indian state was forcing Twitter to delete the profiles of anyone who is a homosexual, would you agree that Twitter should just adapt to local laws and not at least say something? Probably not, right?

We don't have to play pretend, there are countries like Saudi Arabia where that's already a thing. Turns out Twitter happily complies. https://www.humanrightsfirst.org/blog/twitter-not-safe-saudi...

The only moral high ground I'm willing to accept is them leaving such a market, but that doesn't align with their pockets.

With India’s population size, it’s possible more people support the government than exist people in the entirety of the United States.

Why are they wrong and Americans right?

We are talking about freedom of speech here, not food regulations. Once it goes away, it doesn't come back. Where is the line between "culture war" and "moral imperative"? How far does moral relativism go? A country is gradually turning fascist - will you continue your hands-off policy even as they commit genocide? (A million Uighurs say yes unfortunately).

Countries aren't wild animals, to be observed Attenborough-like but not interfered with. They're people. If free speech is good enough for me then it's damn well good enough for them.

A significant part of the world doesn't see what's good for you is good for them.

If they're forbidden from talking, how would we even know?

Indians aren't an alien hive-mind, they're regular people like you and me, and until someone proves otherwise I'm going to assume they don't like being oppressed.

Reality check - Twitter is censoring tweets critical of the government, at government request. Am I really supposed to believe that this government represents the people? Because it sounds less like "cultural differences" and more like bog standard authoritarianism.

I see rights being of intrinsic value how much a country, both its culture and regulators, protect them can be directly scored. you can argue what exactly those rights should be, and you can argue that a society can still be happy and productive without those rights, but you cannot argue that people have their rights when the gov't and their proxies in the business world suppresses them.

all that being said, I suspect there is less policing of speech on twitter in India then what twitter does to discourse in the states.

> Good people upholding their morals instead of dropping them at the door when they go to work

Who gets to define the "Good people"? We've seen time and again that the social media platforms are far from altruistic and in fact enable movements like Trump '16 and Brexit. I agree with your general point though, we should hold companies accountable to the same rigor that we have for govts and individuals.

> upholding their morals

What ethics are you talking about?

The ones where they silenced "Far-Right" Sceptics of Corona-Measures in Europe? A rapper responding with "ok, dude" to a trans person? HK Virologist Li Meng-Yan? The government of Hungary?

Or where they permanently ban conservative cartoonists, the MyPillow guy, Project Veritas – but not the Ayatollah?

AFAIC there's nothing special here to see. Standard Twitter Behaviour.

Also OP's critique is misguided, as there is no specific Indian law Twitter would have broken (according to the article) if it hadn't complied with the government's request. Likewise, there was no law forcing twitter to permanently ban the accounts I've mentioned.

Twitter is just a typical SV org, laden with upper-class virtue-signalers, who couldn't even notice their own bigotry if the stench of human-feces covered San Francisco actually made it into their comfy homes.

I expect Twitter to do exactly the same thing they would do if the US authorities were issuing a legally questionable censorship order. Fight it in the courts. Fight it in the public arena.

Indian Twitter users and Indian civil society should have just the same expectation of receiving support from Twitter's lawyers as U.S users and U.S citizens get. That's what it means to be a global corporation.

>If Indians believe that they need wider free speech rights or other protections, they need to change their political figures and laws accordingly.

Yes, but that is a process. And part of that process is making a fuss about cases like this. You act as if an order issued by some bureaucrat was itself the law and the will of the poeple. That's completely ridiculous. We would never accept that in a rich western country before it has gone through the courts of law and the court of public opinion.

In my view it is outright racist to expect corporations to put up a public legal fight against questionable decisions by authorities in rich countries but consider the same thing a cultural inevitability in poor countries.

I wish I could upvote this twice. The double standard is appalling.

> You act as if an order issued by some bureaucrat was itself the law and the will of the poeple.

I mean, we kind of do act that way. If a given thing has regulations then there almost certainly exists a small office whose sole purpose is to be the button pushers for those regulations, and their word is effectively law unless you're wealthy enough to fight it.

As a comparatively minor example, there's just some guy behind a desk in the MN department of public safety who can unilaterally revoke drivers' licenses without any court's approval or any available appeal's process. The police and the rest of the system are more than happy to enforce that guy's decisions.

*In case there's any ambiguity, the "wealth" mentioned above doesn't just refer to your legal fees, but also to things like being able to afford to repeatedly take a day off work to wait on hold or in a line for yet another round of red tape. It adds up, especially with more than half of people living paycheck to paycheck.

My expectation isn't that a US tech company would break local law. It's that it would get out of market where it would otherwise be forced to do things that doesn't agree with some fundamental values of the company.

> some fundamental values of the company

they do you just misinterpreted what the fundamental values were

My second expectation is that I expect companies not to have "deliver maximum value to its shareholders" as its fundamental value or guiding principle (Unsure if that's what you were alluding to here). That is: I basically expect companies to leave huge amounts of (their investors') money on the table when it goes against the ethical/moral compass of a vocal minority of its users, owners, or employees.

I wasn’t directly alluding to that, more so something like access to a market is more important and maintaining a relationship with the governing gatekeepers of that market is the priority, until the governing body says they cant do an increasing level of business in that government’s markets, thats when the corporation will consider to exit the market entirely

If you want that to be “shareholder value” then sure, but I’m saying corporations don't have strong opinions on anything except antitrust and employees telling them what to do. It is much more predictable along these lines instead of imagining any other abstract expectation of corporations and being surprised over and over again for your whole life.

Don't be evil.

Unless...

> Swiss company doing banking by the Swiss laws in US

In the end, Swiss companies doing Swiss style secret banking in Switzerland were deemed unacceptable to the US and forced to change. It's realpolitik all the way down.

This stuff tends to come down to whether you support the specific policy and outcomes.

Hyped up nationalism is a problem in lots of countries; there's only so much blame you can apply to social media before having to look at other actors as well.

I don’t know about that, the swiss banks i was aware of getting into trouble with the US were very much not doing business in switzerland.

Understandable you'd think Kinder was a German brand, but they're made by Ferrero, an Italian company.

Ah, I keep forgetting that. "Kinder" sounds very German to me.

It is, German for "Child" (cfr. Kindergarten)

Actually, it's German for "children".

Because the word is german indeed.

Ferrero has an long history in using foreign words in their product names.

E.g.

Mon Cheri chocolate in 1956

Nutella in 1964 ("nut" also not an italian word, which would be "nocciola")

Then why are people shitting over Google for attempting to created a censored search engine for China? I think the project was called Dragonfly.

I don’t know, should ask them. Maybe it’s because of the Googles PR giving the idea that they are not in the business of making money but organising world’s knowledge? Maybe they should ask Google why they don’t go non-profit.

Maybe Google backed down because damage on the brand in US would be greater than the expected profits from China? Maybe they back down because employees went political and Google didn't want to lose them?

Or maybe they are simply afraid that these new abilities will come back home?

Maybe because it's wrong to actively help suppress speech in a hostile country regardless of its legality in that country?

Legal and ethical are not the same thing - something can be legal and unethical, or illegal and ethical.

Who says what's wrong or unethical? Would you consider unethical or wrong to take people's guns away? UK, EU or Australia might disagree with the US on this.

What about abortion? What about regulation on what goes into your body? What about blasphemy? What about ending your own life? What about pre-marital sex? What about changing your religion? What about drawing Muhammeds cartoon? What about many other things that are right or wrong depending on who you ask?

Just because it's not always easy to get consensus doesn't mean all positions are equally valid.

In countries with rule of law, elections, and free press, the law in that country holds more importance than unelected dictatorships with state controlled media.

Small L liberalism has a lot of values around the things you suggest: free speech, freedom of expression, laws against violence. A lot of these values make the answers to your questions pretty easy. In the corner cases if the country has rule of law, elections, and a free press - deference to their law is probably fine (though not a panacea).

I don't say they are all equally valid but what's the solutions here? Impose your own rights as long as you can? I guess that's an option but it leads to armed conflicts.

As for the "US superiority" argument, some argue that US is no different than North Korea, maybe US corporations should consider Nordic morales and laws when doing business in India then? After all, according to democracy index Norway is much more democratic than the US.

People stormed the Capitol a few months back and according to the polls a significant portion of the US population thinks that the elections in the USA are not fair and the sitting president is installed there by a deep state cabal. However ridiculous I find these claims, as you can see, it's not a clear cut in the US too. Twitter was even considered a part of the conspiracy.

Indians might ask, why should they be subjected to the morals of US deep state cabal?

Sounds ridiculous but only if you are not among the majority[0] of the Republican party voters.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/nov/10/election-tru...

> "some argue that US is no different than North Korea"

I'm not sure anyone actually argues this? If they do they're not really worth your time.

This isn't "US superiority" it's about rights for individuals in a liberal society. If the US fails to meet these goals then it should do better too.

> "However ridiculous I find these claims, as you can see, it's not a clear cut in the US too. Twitter was even considered a part of the conspiracy."

It's pretty clear cut - lots of people believe insane things, that doesn't make the truth unclear.

> "Indians might ask, why should they be subjected to the morals of US deep state cabal?"

I doubt Indians would ask that, they might ask why a western company is aiding their own government in suppressing the truth about their family and friends dying from Covid though.

I think it's fair to _criticise_ local companies that are giving up certain morals to be able to make business in foreign countries. This creates some pressure and forces companies to consider either keeping the users in your home country happy or to make profits abroad.

We just can't expect the foreign country to change their laws or the company to break those laws.

Wasn't Project Dragonfly shut down by internal Google "activists" rather than by outside forces?

Because they're applying Western ideals to a country (or more specifically a government) that doesn't share those same ideals.

Larry and Sergei were of the opinion that any information, even if censored, is better than no information at all.

> "While removing search results is inconsistent with Google's mission, providing no information (or a heavily degraded user experience that amounts to no information) is more inconsistent with our mission." [1]

They could have pulled out but they were idealistic and felt that their presence was one step towards making the world a better place. Well, that and

> The Google statement said the tradeoff for going against its basic principle of making the "world's information universally available and accessible" is gaining greater access to a quickly growing Chinese economy.

That's the general gist anyway. I forget the specifics but it's covered in a book called In The Plex[2]

[1]: http://edition.cnn.com/2006/BUSINESS/01/25/google.china/ [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Plex

>If Indians believe that they need wider free speech rights or other protections, they need to change their political figures and laws accordingly.

That's a wonderful idea. Pity it's censored in India.

>Imagine the other way around, German company selling Kinder Surprise Eggs in US

TIL that Kinder Surprise Eggs are illegal in the US.

Yep, a result of legislation prohibiting food items containing inedible parts iirc! I always found it amusing.

Interesting, I wonder how they kept skewers and mangos legal.

Unlike AR-15's that kill a great deal more children.

"Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Uh, hello? By law India is a democracy, where it has always been OK to criticize the government - at least up until 2014, when the current government began abusing the British Era sedition laws. I think every Indian on this site is old enough to remember who the protests against the Delhi Rape Crisis and the government response were effectively coordinated on Twitter and Facebook.

Twitter wouldn't have been breaking any laws if precedent weren't being set by this government.

Okay, what's the expectation here? Twitter fixing the "wrong choice" the Indians made in 2014? That doesn't sound like a democracy to me either.

IMHO, if that's the case Indians need to get a new government and fight their own wars. Why would Twitter be liberating the Indian people? If anything, that "liberation" would come at a cost just as with the USSR liberating Germany from the Nazis, US liberating Iraqi people from Saddam, Turkey liberating Turkish Cypriots from the Greek dictatorship.

Because Twitter wasn't breaking any laws. Twitter should not be policing content because none of the people posting on it were breaking any laws either. The only laws Twitter was breaking was a skewed interpretation of a British Era law for which the Indian government is twisting the definition of treason.

>skewed interpretation of a British Era law for which the Indian government is twisting the definition of treason.

There you have it. It’s not up to the companies to police, enforce or interpret laws. That’s the states job and if that’s how they interpret it then that’s how the law is. There are other tools to change laws or interpretations.

Last time I checked, it's the court's job to interpret laws, not the legislature's. And from recent past precedent, we know that the courts haven't interpreted the sedition law the way the government has, yet the Modi government does not give a rats ass and continues to trample over them.

>Last time I checked, it's the court's job to interpret laws, not the legislature's

Sure, court of whatever justice system they have in place but definitely not a corporation. If people don't like the way Modi runs the country, including the justice system, they will need to take him down and install someone who will do it the way they prefer. It's unreasonable to expect that a foreign for profit corporation will do it for them.

What happens if the twitter shareholders replace the current CEO and put someone who is willing to do anything for profit and the most profitable way forward is to work with Modi? Will Indians expect Facebook to step in and save them?

> India is a democracy, where it has always been OK to criticize the government - at least up until 2014,

1. 1975-77: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emergency_(India)

2. 2011: https://www.telegraphindia.com/7-days/when-net-is-gross/cid/...

3. 2008: https://www.theregister.com/2008/05/19/google_india_gandhi/

No Indian politician or government _likes_ criticism. Modi is almost unique in the staggering amount of abuse and vitriol that has been directed towards him over the last twenty years. If it had been any one else, they would probably have lost it by now.

Modi is also unique in the staggering lengths he goes to maintain a sanitized image of himself and his party online.

You forget how much attack Manmohan Singh and Congress came under during the rape crisis, or 2G scam or CWG scam. Did Manmohan Singh lose it like Modi? Did he force Twitter and Facebook to police their posts and groups? If that had happened, I should have been banned on both platforms by now.

It's obvious with physical goods. If the goods aren't inline with the country's laws then you can't sell them there. Simple. It's a lot less obvious with digital services. If I run an online service that's a legal entity in the US, with servers in the US, and someone accesses from a different country, whose laws count more? Should I have to write my code to obey every country's specific legal frameworks? What if two countries conflict? Does it make a difference if there are edge servers in the foreign state that do caching? This is not a simple problem.

“For profit US corporation fighting foreign government atrocities” is a deeply flawed idea.

"For profit US corporation doing what the shareholders want" isn't though, and if the shareholders think that being complicit in covering up atrocities reduces their stock value then the corporation has to fight the foreign government instead. That's how capitalism works.

IBM more or less actively participated in the holocaust with punchcard technology enabling large scale identification and organization of the atrocity.

Did IBM do wrong it were they just operating in a market with different laws?

How do you decide which violations of human rights are just different laws and which are crimes against humanity?

If you think your country's company is doing wrong in a different country by following that country's laws there, push for them to exit that market entirely.

>If Indians believe that they need wider free speech rights or other protections, they need to change their political figures and laws accordingly

And then twitter in India won't ban people just like it does in the US. Oh wait...

If India requires twitter murder a child every time someone tweets, I sure hope they don't just say: "Well, I guess that's just their way of life" and continue operating.

Obviously India is requiring no such thing, but what about when China wants google to build them a censored search engine?

Google will roll up their sleeves and get the IOT guillotine ready, happily running all their american leftie-progressive marketing back home while they do so. Why not? Apple did it!

I don't understand your point. Murdering children is an unequicoval act of heinous evil, deleting posts from your website is a shady business decision.

Where do you draw the line? Lots of people would say that heavily silencing government criticism is evil. Not heinous evil, but can't we be mad at boring evil?

I didn't say not to be mad at anything, it just seems absurd to compare murdering innocents to twitter hiding tweets in one region.

But this isn't "heavily silencing government criticism". Only 50ish tweets were blocked, for containing misinformation that was intended to cause a panic. That's illegal per Indian laws. Criticizing the government is not illegal, and is allowed. If the government were really "heavily silencing government criticism", we would be seeing millions of tweets and accounts being blocked and censored. Instead, it's a narrow targeted set that did things like use images from other circumstances to make it seem like they were part of the COVID situation.

I'm not really focused on this incident, but the idea that it can be a serious issue for major platforms to control speech.

If you're to use a hyperbolic example, at least use a plausible one.

Equating posting anything online to child murder as an acceptable act undoes any sort of point you could be legitimately making.

This is a warped framing.

I don't buy moral relativism, it may be legal in China to put the Uyghurs in camps but any company helping to enable that is on the wrong side of history - legality is irrelevant.

Stuff above that threshold (kinder eggs) sure, follow the country's policies - provided the country is a real democracy, with a free press, and rule of law.

so many Chinese shills downvoting you, so sad :(

at some point you need to draw a line where "profit is the only thing that matters" ends and some basic humanity should prevail

It's appalling that you trivialize human rights. You should be ashamed.

Please don't break the site guidelines like this, regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are. It damages the commons, which is fragile.

Your admirable concern for human rights is possible to express in a way that doesn't contribute to destroying the community.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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