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Comment by Naushad | Hacker News Reader

The article misses some more context.

1. The escalation intensified after tweets by prominent ministers and fucntionaries of the ruling government were marked as "manipulated media" 2. The IT Ministers and opposition partys accounts were locked for copyright infringement. 3. The govt wants twitter to comply on removing content and users critical of govt policies.

[1] https://indianexpress.com/article/india/manipulated-media-de...

[2] https://www.news18.com/news/india/copyright-infringement-twi...

[3] https://www.vice.com/en/article/jg8pzp/india-wants-more-cont... https://restofworld.org/2021/how-india-fell-in-then-out-of-l...

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There is also the context that Twitter refused to remove blatantly false and deliberately incendiary tweets during the farmers' protests in which the Red Fort was breached similar to the Capitol Hill riots.

Also, more recently, Twitter has refused to remove clearly manipulated media intended to inflame Hindu-Muslim communal riots.

Somehow this does not register well with free speech enthusiasts. As much as twitter removes or labels one set of media, it also refuses to remove or label another set of media.

It is unfortunate that what is true and false has devolved into the hands of global corporates, whose interests and ideology is often different from the environment it operates in.

> Somehow this does not register well with free speech enthusiasts

It registers fine. What you may be glossing over is that Twitter itself has free speech - so it is free to do this, unless you have something akin to a fairness doctrine.

Placement of a flag on an empty red fort is simply not comparable to a sustained attack and attempt to kill legislators on Capitol hill.

Can you imagine the Department of Justice declaring Twitter to be no longer protected under section 230, after flagging Trump's tweets?

This feels so, so wrong.

Yes. It feels pretty right that you can't claim you're not editorializing if you decide to censure the leader of the country because of arbitrary reasons, like claiming coronavirus came from a lab is a conspiracy theory.

What happens in India is actually the opposite, it's the government requiring the censuring.

I'm always on the side of free speech. It shouldn't be up to Twitter to decide if coronavirus came from the lab, or if "mail in ballot fraud is very rare, as few as 0.001%" (a completely bonkers notion that was also later debunked, but served to prevent any discussion before the election despite it's absurdity).

Near the beginning of the pandemic people were told to sanitize surfaces thoroughly as a way to inhibit the spread of Covid. Many people had doubts about this guidance, but if you tweeted that such measures were ineffective, Twitter would censor you and/or label you as a spreader of misinformation. Months later, a study finally confirmed that the chances of catching covid from a contaminated surface was extremely low. Therefore, sanitizing surfaces was no longer recommended or necessary. But it’s not like Twitter’s trust and safety team is going to go back and unban you in light of this.

The key takeaway is, if you are comfortable with Twitter taking such actions with potential ‘misinformation’ then you must also accept that what is considered correct at any point in time is subject to a potential reversal. The staff at Twitter is just as fallible as the rest of us.

I don't think your story about Twitter banning skepticism about surface cleaning is true. I remember being involved in several long Twitter threads on that topic with no one being banned.

Just because you didn't see it happen, doesn't mean it didn't happen. If we accept your report at face value. all you've proven is that their algorithm isn't 100% comprehensive regardless of impact/number of followers of the people, etc.

It seems far more reasonable to me that if POTUS or $randomCelebrity tweets something it will get more scrutiny from the moderation efforts at Twitter than I would if I tweeted the same thing.

My personal anecdote is more proof than what BuyMyBitcoins provided for his assertion.

eh. in india the government sets the boogeyman and the national media as well as the government troll factory just lap it up.

read these posts. india government calls anything critical of its actions on social media as "misuse" because it breaks the image of "worlds largest democracy".

Twitter is being assholes. they should just patch up like facebook which fully complies with government meaning facebook becomes the best monitoring and investigation portal for them. like the last time facebook had found some political influence on their software but once they found the ruling party was involved, they dropped the investigation

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/apr/15/facebook-...

https://scroll.in/article/954711/in-kashmir-a-spree-of-arres...

https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-natio...

Twitter should patch up and let a billion people have uncertain future on free speech (or at least what's left of it) amidst a blatant dystopia?

well facebook has done the same and they are much bigger than twitter so yeah why not?

the narcissist in chief demands his photo be plastered everywhere. anyone against that image is mowed down.

> Twitter is being assholes. they should just patch up like facebook which fully complies with government meaning facebook becomes the best monitoring and investigation portal for them. like the last time facebook had found some political influence on their software but once they found the ruling party was involved, they dropped the investigation

Nah. I like the increased scrutiny against Social Media companies that has come up.

The US DoJ couldn't do that because Section 230 in the US is different from Section 79 in India. In particular, India's Section 79 includes the clause:

The provisions of sub-section (1) [the liability shield] shall apply if— ... (b) the intermediary does not— ... (iii) select or modify the information contained in the transmission;

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