Twitter sees jump in govt demands to remove content of reporters, news outlets

People keep bringing up the Arab spring as an argument for Twitter being socially beneficial.

However, I am not sure the Arab Spring was a net positive. Tunisia turned out ok, but Libya is still a disaster. Egypt went from Dictator to Islamist Party to Military Dictatorship. Syria has seen massive death and destruction and Assad is still clinging to power. Yemen is involved in a nasty civil war.

I think many in the West take a too rosy view of the Arab Spring. For the average Middle Easterner in those countries, the Arab Spring has been a disaster.

The line you’re promoting is exactly what the state sponsored media that the U.S. employs wants you to believe. Remember that the U.S. set up a fake Twitter clone to sow division and misinformation in Cuba? 2014: https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/03/us-cuban-twitt...

Parler users would like to disagree. So do users of other platforms who can not use mainstream payment systems to pay for their services, and can not install the apps using Google or Apple app stores.

I think by now one has to be extremely naive and uninformed to claim that only individual user choices are the factor in whether or not a social network can prosper.

> you can't dictate which sites people decide to use

You can invest in education and empower people to make informed choices about the source or value of the information. This is an investment governments go out of their way to avoid because it just so happens the same lack of education that gets people hooked up on low quality content is what makes them easily manipulated by the political class.

*Are* these sites popular as functions of individual choices? It’s been pretty well established that governments and regulators in the U.S. overlooked the actions of or actively supported these companies from the start.

Eh, governments could probably take a supply-side approach and throw money at new ARPAnet protocols for developing federated content publishing networks to grow competing networked application ecosystems without resorting to heavy handed authoritarianism.

> company or person

Billion dollar companies are not persons, they should not have the same rights at all. At that size they start to mingle heavily with politicians. They want politicians to enact the right policies, and in return those politicians wants the company to censor the right people or fund their campaigns. Just because there is no formal agreement here doesn't mean that the companies aren't just the extended arm of the government and vice versa.

Newspapers and persons obviously should choose to express their own opinions.

Twitter is different: It is close to a common carrier, and you can't just shut down one side of the political discussion. If you do, you'll have the appearance of free discussion, when in reality you are exercising totalitarian control.

That is more harmful for democracy than occasional idiots dressing up in Viking costumes and entering the capitol (of course, riots of the opposing spectrum can be safely promoted on Twitter anyway).

> should not be able to choose or express it’s own side in any matter of political contention

It goes back to the conversations expressed elsewhere in this post about twitter being an utility, de-facto.

If it is given that status, then there are some expectations that come with it.

Once a company takes a political position, then it cannot appeal on 'moral' or other subjective grounds.

> How does that even work?

I don't know... maybe an entity like the Swiss? Not sure if it is a good example, being a country itself? The reason people seem to be ok with the presence of the country is that it is strictly neutral, and both sides protected it.

> Who gets to decide which topics or points of view are off-the-table for normal social-media moderation?

How about no one?

> I guess you’re saying government figures and major political parties could decide unilaterally. We’ll have to repeal the first amendment, anyway.

The 1st amendment is for the US exclusively. This version of the Freedom of speech is a distinctively American concept, and for that reason, twitter actually finds some tepid support from conservatives.

Each country is sovereign in the laws that govern their land, unless they breach some major crimes, and thats when the UN steps in. Nothing new here.

> How does that even work?

Well, it could work similar to the existing and uncontroversial laws, that are already widespread on certain communication companies.

Specifically, we could take common carrier laws, which already apply to certain communication companies, and extend them.

Those laws are uncontroversial, and established. So it is silly to claim that such a thing is unconventional.

> We’ll have to repeal the first amendment

No we won't. Common carrier laws already exist, and we didn't have to repeal the 1st amendment to have them.

They don't want them smaller they want their autonomy not their sized reduced. Specifically they cling to the idea that social media ought to be a common carrier as obliged to carry their views as that of their detractors. If you look at the actual speech that is being disincentivized this looks objectively terrible in our present context.

Being large just makes you a large target, smaller things like HN wont get targeted since governments lack the capacity to handle that many things. And being large doesn't offer much protection to resist once targeted either, no matter how large they are they wont sacrifice significant revenue for moral reasons.

twitter is attacked exactly because they are the only voice out there.

As an example, There are several newspapers in India, which still continue to post opinions critical of the government. There is a system of courts still, sort of working, and would step in if things got too bad.

A single shut down of a platform can be written off as "for the children" or some other character assassination BS. When you start repeatedly attacking platforms that's when you get the moderates of your country to start taking umbridge.

I think a good parallel might be TikTok in the US, Trump was exploring banning the platform toward the end of his term without a particularly large pushback from the general populace (though a whole bunch of pushback from tech literate folks). You can use excuses like that a time or two without raising too many eyebrows, but once it becomes a pattern people get angry.

Having more smaller platforms makes it harder to effectively accomplish any censorship since your few shutdown freebies won't significantly impact the ability for political opponents to communicate with the public.

Well this already happened and we're still using it, but it's called ARPAnet.

Instead of building a hypertext website they could finance an ARPA-E program to develop new federated content publishing protocols. Then have the Department of Energy build out and maintain the initial cloud infrastructure as a public utility.

Any user files stored on network slices have the same legal and privacy protections as mail held at the United States Post Office, and people are free to store encrypted files using whatever encryption scheme they want in the same way that they are free to send pages of gibberish through the mail.

If DoE builds out a cloud network then DoD could also lease a portion of the infrastructure for JEDI.

So, a lot like our existing national conversation?

Honest question: what keeps the present private-for-profit social media platforms from falling in the same pit?

That seems fine, as long as I can just not subscribe to them.

It sounds like you're conflating market incentives with government misconduct.

Governments "can do this" because we're letting them get away with it. Plain and simple. The money is mostly irrelevant in the matter.

The fact that Twitter has an incentive to follow the law and preserve its own existence is beside the point.

They have government takedown requests from China, Russia, and Spain.

https://github.com/github/gov-takedowns

Probably not, DMCA takedowns are not from the government, but from non-governmental entities that claim copyright is being infringed.

Governments have the ability to require a request not be made public, so a repo of their requests would not be complete, and I suspect some large offenders would be absent entirely because of that.

Yes that is the one, thanks

I am sure Australian restrictions on freedom of speech would not override the US constitution for a US company.

I was just referring to the DMCA notices here https://github.com/github/dmca , but I think it is a great idea for transparency.

For all you know, windex may already be using Mastodon or some other service that's part of the Fediverse.

Your question should instead be aimed at the millions of people who still use Twitter, but of course you know the answer already: They use Twitter because millions of other people also use it, i.e. network effects.

Been there, helped build an open source decentralized product. Rhetorical demand higher than actual demand.

Of course it's a ridiculously difficult nut to crack. But people like the idea more than the reality, and it's hard to blame them when the product typically has some serious (and likely unavoidable) tradeoffs.

Nowadays people target multiple platforms in parallel, streaming to YT/rumble/odysse at the same time for example.

> "The only people who are using decentralized tools are the ones that have been kicked out of these big social medias at first place."

Do you honestly believe that? Some of us use decentralized tools because we remember the Internet before centralization and corporate/government control over it started turning it into a cesspool of advertising and propaganda and see the huge corporate properties (Facebook especially) for the societal poison that they are.

Those information requests also likely include law enforcement investigations for a wide range of activities. Plenty of crooks get caught just because they blabbed about it on social media.

So these "information requests" could be, say, checking a user's IP to track fake news?

> We can’t have no moderation. There are a million reasons from spam to hostile government bots etc.

Why not though? Why can't I choose how I moderate spam? If platforms like Twitter and Facebook want to protect users from spam content, why can't there be law requiring any moderation operate as a opt-in / opt-out system so long as the content is otherwise legal? If a platform doesn't want to do this that's fine and we can just treat them as a publisher.

I'm sure some people will complain that Twitter is biased in how they operate their spam filters, but for me this is fine so long as whatever they're doing to curate the content is entirely optional.

I agree that we can't have zero moderation, but we should also recognize that large social media platforms have become the de facto public square and while it is lawful for them to moderate content, it's detrimental to our society. If I had to choose between trusting Twitter to moderate such a large volume of our society's speech and flat-footedly regulating them like a public utility to the extent that their quality drops and they vanish into the ether whence they came, I'd certainly choose the latter. That said, I think we can find middlegrounds that provide for high quality digital content while also allowing people to have robust speech freedoms in practice.

One such incarnation which is particularly interesting to me is the idea of regulating compliance with an open protocol such that Twitter doesn't own your social network, but rather they are simply one option through which you can access that social network. If you like Twitter's monetization model and moderation, great. If you don't, you can trivially go elsewhere (i.e., you don't have to leave your connections and conversations behind--you can continue to participate in the same conversations from your new social media portal) or even build your own.

> At least the US legally allows companies (ie prevents government censorship) to choose what they moderate...

This directly conflicts with the following statement from the article itself.

> Twitter said in the report India was now the single largest source of all information requests from governments during the second half of 2020, overtaking the United States, which was second in the volume of requests.

This discussion _is_ about the US (but also other governments) censoring Twitter posts.

As far as the distinction between what is legal and what I think should be the case... I think this is illegal as the government is coercing censorship. It's certainly legal if Twitter censors itself.

As far as what I think should be the case... I don't think government should be anywhere near the public square, and I personally don't use these platforms. I'm doing what I can to move to more distributed platforms with better speech.

HN is pretty great, but I left reddit a while ago. If a private co censors too much for me, then I have the choice to leave.

If the government enforces censorship, then I'm toast.

> The current winners in these social network markets have basically aligned with one political side. This isn’t even a question any more.

In terms of funding of political parties, this is pretty far from the truth.

> The current winners in these social network markets have basically aligned with one political side. This isn’t even a question any more.

Sure it is. Corporations are not hive mind beings, they make arbitrary rules then enforce them arbitrarily based on who's looking at the data feed when they see borderline TOS-breaking content.

Instead of calling them "bots", call them propagandists.

They are often real humans writing spin.

>Just like in old media. We have fox and cnn, we will have Facebook Twitter and whatever the right will build.

I don't think it's destined or even likely to end up this way. The reason there's no major conservatively aligned social media is because the vast majority of users don't care much about politics. They may vote Republican, but they don't follow Republicans on Twitter, and they ignore politically heated debates on Facebook. The number of conservatives who want to talk politics with other conservatives is not enough to sustain anything on the same scale as Twitter or Facebook.

Don't compare these services to CNN or Fox News. News inherently involves politics, so it's easy for news services to differentiate themselves with politics. Instead, think of it like Disney+ and Hulu. Which is the one for conservatives?

They are a private company, etc.

But here it's not what they choose to remove, not "moderation.. It's what those in power press them to remove, aka "censorship".

I find that scary actually. Many of the same people were ostensibly for unions and breaking up big tech to minimize their power, but are now embracing the full exercise of their power? Worse, endorsing an effective merger of media and state, which is an expansion of centralized power into the ultimate monopoly. The big tech giants are increasingly setting the boundaries of conversation based on government agencies.

Is this not an incredibly powerful tool of censorship and propaganda? Imagine this in the hands of a dictator. We are sowing the seeds of our own oppression.

Is it a bad defense though?

I think that the problem is about concentration of power more than speech rights and the real takeaway is that allowing 3 or 4 companies to control such an overwhelming share of communications infrastructure is a mistake regardless of what rules there are.

The argument that we should lean on Twitter to maintain such nebulous concepts as "freedom" at the expense of their own profits is never going to convince me.

And to think that Twitter is an arms length away from the government when it - along with every other Big Tech - helped the NSA illegally spy on literally hundreds of millions of Americans.

Twitter is going to do what the people in the government want it to do.

In thinking on it a bit, you could call Twitter a “printing press” of sorts. They have no stake in the content game, per se, but are the means of transmission.

The precedent here is that printing presses also held a lot of power in their time to print, which is why the newspapers themselves owned their own printing presses: so they couldn’t silenced by a third party.

I don’t think you can expect to use someone else’s means of transmission freely and expect free reign of usage.

That just means we ought to explore ways to decentralize distribution systems like Twitter.

As a private company, Twitter's goal is to maximize shareholder revenue. Without external forces, Twitter wouldn't moderate anything because it costs money and reduces ad revenue. Twitter is just following what the governments and cancellers want.

Editorial control over twitter.com is Twitter's freedom of expression as well.

Their censorship is abhorrent, but shouldn't be illegal.

If I'm hosting some content... I have rights too.

I think it's hilarious. I grew up with Republicans and neoliberals using this argument as the basis for anti-LGBT discrimination, but now it's problematic? I have some genuine concerns about what people are calling censorship and cancel culture, but I'm not saying anything for at least a few more years.

That's maddening for sure, but not as maddening as the argument that it's okay to censor something that is wrong or fake news or misinformation. History is littered with wrong takes that turned out to be correct, fake news that turned out to be real, and misinformation that turned out to be informative.

And the worst of all is the censorship of hate speech, because hate speech has become a malleable term used simply to eventually become an opinion I don't like.

Remember the whole "punch a Nazi", meme? Who doesn't think a Nazi deserves punching? But eventually, everyone becomes a Nazi, so any violence against them is justified.

This artificially constructed right not to be offended needs to die in a fire.

I feel like "they are a private company" is a NO U argument - after Comcast spent the better half of a decade arguing against common-carrier/Net Neutrality rules on the same basis. Right-wingers were very supportive of this argument when it protected ISPs, even though the result was more social media consolidation that ultimately harmed right-wingers.

That being said, we do need to be cautious of extending the (legal) definition of censorship out this far. You run the risk of defining censorship to include any sort of counter-speech, or making it impossible to legally moderate Internet platforms for any purpose. "Anyone who provides an Internet platform must be willing to host any and all speech whatsoever" just means nobody will want to host such forums.

Something like common-carriage for large social media platforms could work - though it won't give the right wing what they want. Most of them absolutely were violating those platforms rules, and common-carriage won't let them back on those platforms. The reason why I say common-carrier rules would be a good thing for large Internet platforms is because in practice companies like Twitter and Facebook adopted a policy of "let world leaders do what they want on our platform", up until January 2021. This is not at all a defensible policy. If you have a rule against doing something on your platform, why let people in power do it anyway?

The problem is that bad actors can abuse these platforms from multiple sides. In this case the issue is censorship, but there’s also the spreading of misinformation and propaganda that can also pose serious threats to democracy. I don’t know why the anti-censorship crowd doesn’t acknowledge this.

In the US, Trump used social media to spread lies about the results of the elections. He tried to pull all the stops to stay in power. This is the same President who attacked journalism, rescinded access to White House press events for news sources that were critical of Jim, and used the Justice department to seize records of journalists. Trump was a bigger threat to journalism while he was in office than any content moderation rules Twitter could ever enforce.

The US Constitution doesn't apply to Twitter operations in India.

The government of India probably doesn't give a shit about Twitter's First Amendment rights.

If US govt does that. Sure other countries govt just write the laws so it's legal to do taht

US First Amendment:

> Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

It prohibits Congress from restricting the press or individuals to speak freely via laws that Congress writes. The 1st amendment has nothing to do with Corporations restricting things in their purview. The 1st amendment doesn't apply to any social media or online commentary by people. It might apply to the "press" since online news is more pervasive than physical newspapers. What would be interesting is a clearer definition of press as it relates to social media accounts.

And if a person was prevented from printing an article in a newspaper, wouldn't that just be a veto on a particular means of speech?

Our government isn't supposed to do this stuff. It's evil even if the initial intentions aren't.

Huh? This is exactly about government telling Twitter to silence journalists.

Governments have done all those things to people because of what they've said on Twitter.

> Being blocked from twitter is ... a non-event.

Good, then by extension leaving the person on Twitter is also a non-event. So it seems there is no need for censorship here!

Can we stop pretending that the right didn't do this to themselves? It's fine for politicians and elected officials to have their own opinions, it's not OK for them to misrepresent them as outright facts. That's literally the definition of "fake news" which they love to tout anytime someone says something uncomfortable about them. As these politicians continue to live in an alternate reality, they bring with them an inordinate number of voters. As we go from stretching the truth to lying, the lies become more extreme, as do the political views. We are no longer Americans with different views, we are opponents unable to have a discussion about the issues. And of course now the left is also free to use similar tactics going forward. It's a slippery slope. Both parties must be held accountable for their b.s.

I'm an unaffiliated/independent voter and I've voted for both parties in the past (with varying levels of regret for both parties.)

It's not OK for Fox News & CNN to be political party propaganda machines. It's not OK for Twitter/Facebook/etc to censor only the right for their opinions. Having said that I think it's completely fair for them to kick them off their platform for perpetuating outright, destabilizing lies.

That was their decision, and it's absolutely different than the government demanding that content is removed. The First Amendment applies to the government demands and not Twitter operating as a private entity.

Why would you think that censorship of Trump was purely voluntary decision by the big tech?

I saw they just arrested a man for saying racist things online after the Italy v England game. That's totally bonkers to me. We all agree racism is wrong but should speech backed by no actions be criminalized? I personally don't think so. Just ban the person from the platform and have private individuals handle it. The government has no place policing speech, it's a slippery slope to saying anything falls under x. I remember people complaining the governments were sweeping everything into the category of "terrorism" in order to stifle speech...that has disappeared. People seemed less inclined to support free speech now. Something I don't understand.

Update: they arrested a 12yo boy over „racist messages“.

https://twitter.com/wmpolice/status/1282341956199350272?s=21

Let companies decide what is ok on their own platforms, but don't let them get so big, and break them up now that they have become so big.

Which lines are those? Specifics would help.

If the populace isn’t aware they’re being fighting authoritarian censorship then I’d question if they are experiencing authoritarian censorship.

>Humanity has never been served well by institutions when those institutions attempted to influence the distribution of information. It just shows how fragile and desperate those institutions are.

Fixed it.

Agreed. That’s the low hanging fruit. Question is where we go from there:

Allowing for content moderation opens the door to selective bias. On the other hand, a “hands off” approach can lead to its own form of content extremism.

The ability to post anonymously (at least anonymously to other users) will come into the conversation as well.

No, it says the US government is the number two for "information requests." It doesn't mention anything about the US and requests to remove content.