Twitter Banned in Russia | Hacker News Reader

Twitter Banned in Russia

interfax.ru

102 pointsushakov84 comments

I wonder if a day will ever come when a "X major site banned in the USA" headline crosses HN for speech reasons. We've been surprisingly tolerant of a lot of nonsense from a top-down perspective. The closest we get is a grassroots campaign to get Joe Rogan off Spotify.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump–TikTok_controvers...

Rather, I think the closest was when Trump threatened to ban TikTok.

But that was because security and not speech. Close but a different issue. We've shut down a lot of stuff for that reason.

You can always formulate speech issue as security issue. Cite ideological security/resilience for example.

The classic example is "shouting fire in a crowded theater"; a phrase we still hear today, despite its origin being the prosecution of anti-war activists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schenck_v._United_States

It was because Trump wanted to poke China and because a TikTok campaign embarrassed Trump by buying up all the tickets to a Trump crusade rally.

If it were security, then it still would be, and we'd still be having the discussion. It was about Trump, so when Trump lost interest or the ability to cause hassle, the problem also went away.

I'd say more security theatre than security

Trump's social media site/thing won't be able to take off properly because if they allow the level of 'freedom of speech' on there that they say they want to allow, neither Apple's nor Google's app stores will host the Truth Social app.

At least that's what I've seen people say, and it sounds quite plausible.

So in that regard there is some way that the web gets policed in the US.

sounds quite plausible to me. USA as a whole is definitely a lot more tolerant of speech than many other countries, but we're definitely moving in a direction where only speech that is within the accepted norms of society is permitted. (At least in virtual space. You can still spout off stupid opinions in person)

Private companies are making that decision, not the government. That's a big difference.

of course, I never said otherwise. But even still, in the US the federal government is keeping lists of people who they feel should be banned across all social media, and sending them to Facebook (and surely others). When private sector and government work that closely, the line blurs quite a bit as to whether it's government or private sector, and whether that's become a distinction rather than a difference.

> Private companies are making that decision, not the government. That's a big difference.

There is an ideological dispute about how big a difference that is.

Many years ago, I identified as an anarchist (not anymore). While I was an anarchist, I followed intently the debates between anarcho-socialists (left anarchists) and anarcho-capitalists (right anarchists). A major part of the debate was whether it made a difference whether someone doing something was the government or a private entity. From the anarcho-capitalist viewpoint, the public-private distinction has a fundamental philosophical, ideological, political and moral significance – governments and private corporations are radically different kinds of entities, whose actions ought to be judged by very different standards. From the anarcho-socialist viewpoint, the public-private distinction is largely artificial, arbitrary, irrelevant – governments and private corporations are just two slightly different flavours of the same soup.

Although few people involved in these debates over the possibility of "censorship by private corporations" would identify as anarchists (of either variety), I think the same distinction is at play here; but, unlike those anarchist debates, the parties in the "censorship by private corporations" debate seem less aware of the role that fundamental difference may have in motivating their respective positions.

The difference between a private company and the government is that the government has a monopoly on the use of force. A government can imprison you for life. A company can't.

Suppose the anarcho-capitalists somehow gain political power, and get to actually implement their ideas. They privatise the police, the prisons, and the court system, setting up a free market of competing privately-owned police corporations, prison corporations, and court corporations. They also re-legalise imprisonment for debt, because freedom of contract is a holy and sacred thing ("you aren't really free if you aren't free to contract away your freedom"). Finding yourself on hard times in the new order, your borrow some money from a privately-owned bank; the bank has put an imprisonment-for-debt clause in its loan contract, which you don't like, but you can't find any other lender willing to lend to you without one, and you really need the money. Unsurprisingly, you soon find yourself unable to make the repayments. The privately-owned bank goes to a privately-owned court, and successfully applies for an order for your imprisonment; the bank sends the court order to a privately-owned police force, who arrest you and take you to a privately-owned prison. The court costs, police costs, and imprisonment costs have all been added to your debt. The privately-owned prison sends you to work in a privately-owned slave labour factory. In theory, you can get out at any time if you just repay your ever-growing debt; in practice, you know you'll never be able to repay it, so you'll be here for the rest of your life. But, it ain't too bad – no government did this to you, no monopoly of force was used against you. There are other court companies and police companies, and if only you could have afforded their services, they would have defended you against all this. That all makes it okay, doesn't it now?

This may sound weird, but the world you described sounds awful yet interesting.

>only speech that is within the accepted norms of society is permitted

By "society", do you mean a loud minority of blue checkmarks on Twitter?

And the media, who echo the statements of those blue checkmarks as though they were the authoritative words of god himself.

There's no prospect of anything like that happening to a mainstream site in the US, at least not over political speech. For sex, drugs, and violence-related sites it can and has happened but that is a qualitatively different case.

> I wonder if a day will ever come when a "X major site banned in the USA" headline crosses HN for speech reasons. We've been surprisingly tolerant of a lot of nonsense from a top-down perspective. The closest we get is a grassroots campaign to get Joe Rogan off Spotify.

[Russia does a thing] Lets talk about the US.

Nearly every damn thread.

I might get downvoted for restating this, but for all its faults and headlines in recent years, America truly is built on laissez-faire principles so it’s unlikely to happen.

Proof is the extent to which Alex Jones types of figures have yet to be totally banned by the government, just deplatformed by private social networks.

That being said the conversation about Tik Tok and Chinese ownerships and servers did seem to get close to this.

...and to bring this back to Russia - what other social media platforms remain in Russia to get the word out on what's going on in Ukraine.

I truly believe that if most Russians could SEE the death and destruction Putin is causing, he might actually get deposed.

> I truly believe that if most Russians could SEE the death and destruction Putin is causing, he might actually get deposed.

I truly believe that's wishful thinking. Even if most Russians hated Putin, as long as he's got control over a strong domestic security apparatus and continued support from his cronies, he's not going to get deposed.

Wasn't this [1] such an event in practice? It's not government action, but it's certainly co-ordinated and one step up from a "grassroots" campaign. (I personally don't have much of an opinion on the event, I'm just noting that it seems to match what you were wondering about.)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25706993

Similar but also very different. Refusal to host is not the same thing as a ban, Parler continues to work just fine in the US and is accessible from PC, Android, and iOS devices. To make it really the same thing you'd need to have these companies blocking access not just refusing to host or provide access as part of their business.

The main difference to me is that 'banned in X country' implies availability outside of that country. The Parler situation was about the viability of the site as a whole.

'Weibo banned in the USA' is very different.

Categorically it's far less of a problem, but it does bring to light that we do need some kind of digital bill of rights.

I believe Twitter and AWS should have seperately defined rights as to who they can kick off and why.

My domain provider or webhost should have very limited and specific scenarios/structured protocols in regards to people asking for my contact information, how they can treat me when receiving any random unverified DMCA requests, etc. There should be no part of the protocol where they hand out my information without my knowledge, and without my consent, and without verifying the requestor, without fully informing me of every step they take before they do it, and without my right to object.

RT America (Russian TV station) just filed for bankruptcy after being dropped by DirecTV and Roku at the same time. [1] Does that count, or does it have to be the government doing it?

[1] https://deadline.com/2022/03/rt-america-to-halt-production-a...

RT America wasn't self-sufficient, itwas the local operation of Russian state media in the US, who, as well as losing key distribution channels and contracted-out production for some content due to private partners abandoning doing business with them, also suffered from the financial difficulty it's Russian immediate parent and the Russian state are experiencing in operating overseas due to sanctions.

Specifically it will no longer be possible for RT headquarters to transfer funds to their American subsidiary in order to pay employees and vendors. If they had a sufficient local revenue source then they could continue operating. They haven't been directly banned.

Any Russian users here - does the average person here not wonder why so many previously acceptable services are being blocked and/or silenced? Do they not wonder what it is that the authorities want to shield them from?

I assume average person isn't here. And those who are here know why and have ways to bypass government censorship too.

Polls show most Russians are backing Putin

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/04/russia-appears...

Are polls trustworthy either way at this point? People are getting jailed for showing up to protest at all. Answering ‘No’ or abstaining from participation just seems like you’re signing yourself up for a trip to the gulag.

Remember when the majority of Americans supported a War in Iraq?

It's easy to build domestic support for almost any war in the early days. It's the long hard reality of war that turns people against it.

I think Putin has some elaborate misinformation most of the country believes, like how we had lied about WMDs.

Yeah. And then 8 years later when it becomes pretty clear Iraq/Ukraine doesn’t want you there, it’s hard to keep the populace misinformed.

They're probably pretty accurate, yes. Not that I agree with any of it; but Putin has a ton of "justifications" for what's happening in Ukraine right now. The main one being that the US & West are threatening Russia's entire existence via NATO expansion.

If most of the media around you is state-sanctioned and pro-Putin, it's super easy to go along with Putin's justifications.

I'm fairness, Western European countries have done the same to Russian media.

Here in the UK RT News suddenly disappeared from the air.

As the saying goes, the first casualty of war is the truth. That applies everywhere.

Eehhhh... do you think most Western Europeans don't know what's going on?

I don't know what's really going on, only at best an approximation because all the reports I have access to are biased in some way.

It's important to recognise this.

Thank you for saying this. I really can't stand the "west good, everyone else bad" arrogance I see here sometimes. Western rulers lie to their people too!

As an exercise, search for "the ghost of kyiv" and then try to imagine what the headlines would look like if it were a actually a fake russian story about a russian pilot instead of a ukrainian one.

The difference is that you can still see first hand reports from individuals in Russia. But all media in the state has to repeat what government says or be banned like Echo of Moscow. Since this morning individuals will be jailed too, but I doubt it would be impossible to find someone defying this new law.

It usually always possible to see the negative aspects of the other side. After all, that's what your side wants you to see.

But it's hard to see the negative aspects of your side.

For instance, did you know that the Ukrainians essentially executed an Israeli civilian at a checkpoint because they though he was Chechen? Our media pick and choose what they report and how they report it.

I think RT was literally shut down (with people laid off) by Russia... sooo yeah.

I saw a thing about it on Reddit earlier today/yesterday (seemed to be about the Russian channel?), and this[1] seems to be about the American wing.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/03/russia-backed-cable-news-sta...

In Europe RT News did not shut down, they were banned.

Ah I see now, thanks. Went through my history and realised that in a thread talking about EU RT being shut down, this[1] thread was linked which I thought was about RT but I see now that it isn't.

Looks like RT is/was very government-backed and spreading a ton of misinformation - so I can understand why people would want to shut it down (for spreading verifiably incorrect information), but on the other hand can also see why it's not a good look :/

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/ukraine/comments/t5ug4p/the_entire_...

Same could be said for Youtube in Europe, Direct TV, Roku, etc banning Russia Today (RT), Reddit banning .RU domains and so on.

One is a one way propaganda TV channel and the others are ways to communicate. Same can't be said.

No, isn't exact comparison but it is the same vein. RT.com headlines have actually been relatively straight forward statement of fact with out charged language. I suspect many at the channel are against the war. They also present full or longer clips of Russian official, instead of (possibly misleading) sound bites.

One doesn't have to agree with a viewpoint to find value in knowing what the other side thinks, instead of being told what they think.

FOX News and MSNBC are a form of propaganda as well.

> RT.com headlines have actually been relatively straight forward statement of fact with out charged language

this is how propaganda works

they tell mostly truth, but 5-10% of it of propaganda

you won't notice it on first sight, otherwise you wouldn't watch it

but watching it for years daily have eroded your brain already

If your bar for “not propaganda” is 95% truthful, what news site is left that passes that test?

>> they tell mostly truth, but 5-10% of it of propaganda

> If your bar for “not propaganda” is 95% truthful, what news site is left that passes that test?

You misunderstand the test. A better way to state it would be: "they tell mostly truth, but 5-10% is deliberate, institutionally-sanctioned lies."

A lot of people can't seem to tell the difference between false statements and lies, and conflate the concepts all the time. Add hindsight into the mix, and it gets even worse.

My take is that most people use VK instead of Facebook and Twitter isn't used much either. Sure, some people use it, but it's nowhere near the popularity of Telegram or Instagram.

Some friends, who lurk on Facebook more, do periodically share this or that post that seems to be bashing Russia, so no wonder they blocked Facebook. Same for Twitter. I think people might get more hurt by a ban of Instagram.

Another point is that people who care enough about free speech, democracy, etc. are more likely to be aware of and use VPN services, so they might still be able to access the content, but people who don't use VPN are unlikely to install it just to check some viral anti-regime post on Facebook, so maybe this is a move to prevent future growth of the audience reading news on Facebook.

Of course, take this all with a grain of salt, as I hardly use Facebook or Twitter, just Messenger sometimes. I'm mostly extrapolating from the usage by my friends and family.

Average russians don't use twitter or facebook, it's mostly the educated middle class.

Educated middle class people know what's going on, hate Putin and have been protesting it all since 2011, but there's only so much they can do against an armed police state that arrest kids and runs a torture convenor belt in prisons: https://www.the-sun.com/news/4045314/videos-putin-prisons-in...

I think their money becoming basically worthless is probably tipping people off something is up.

So far, this just looks like another recession for regular Russians, and not as bad as 1998-99 [1]. At least as far as "their money" goes. Losing access to western goods, services and travel may be the more noticiable factor, at least for some people.

[1] from The Economist: https://archive.ph/T61OQ

Wow, YouTube as well apparently. I wonder if this will be a watershed moment in the balkanization of the internet, or if this access will be restored at some point in the future.

And Facebook, if the Google translation is correct

Edit: supposedly the BBC are on the naughty list, too

Feels like a watershed moment. Though we've had countries ( india, china, US, russia ) block or try to block each other social media before. EU has already don't this to russian media/social media. Though it's not technically a country.

But I do think months/years after the war is over, everyone will let social media back into their countries after series of negotiations.

Youtube? Sounds like much bigger news to me than a Twitter ban inside Russia.

I'm not too familiar with the Russian netscape, is there a local YT alternative?

It was posted as such here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30560125

But I haven't seen good corroborating sources yet.

(pardon for linking Russian website, the announcement just came 10 minutes ago)

It's a good thing for the public to know what the Russian administration and people are saying and thinking, no pardon is required. This is another good reason why not to banish .ru from the interweb. It's the other side that benefits from silencing the opposition, which is a sign of who is winning the debate.

Both sides are silencing the opposition, one side with government power and the other through media distribution monopolies. RT America (a Russian TV station) just declared bankruptcy after being dropped by DirecTV and Roku at the same time.

I'll ask this question again: Twitter is garbage, why do people discuss important social & political issue there? At best twitter is able to accommodate to 2 opposing points of view in a "thread" (barely).

Most of the times, the so called thread is just a single narrative with very hard to track opposing comments here and there.

Forget it if you have more than 2 points of view on the topic.

And absolutely nothing nuance can be discussed.

I'd like to see a traditional news organization, say NYT, investing in an open forum platform, maybe decentralized, to help informing the public.

People like garbage. Even if it’s harmful to them. I don’t think people running Twitter are taking one side or the other. Like Facebook, Twitter is simply evil and tries its best to funnel the kind of content to you that would keep you “engaged” and angry. Only know, instead of stupid kids, and jobless schmucks, the people being kept engaged are politicians, influential scholars and journalists who think that nukes are just another type of bomb and nothing to be afraid of.

It will be interesting to see how this affects bot farms that seem to originate from there.

Anti-covid activity already went down right after Russian invasion to Ukraine

I'm not sure it's related, in my internet neighborhood covid generally getting way less attention than before the invasion

Could you elaborate? Is this just something you noticed, or are you referring to some publicly available metric?

There were some stats and graphs showing quantity of posts in Twitter related to anti-covid topics and how they changed after February 24th. Russia has extremely large bot-farms where low-skilled people just copy-paste same things from main distribution channels into social networks like Twitter. They had to change narrative due to newly introduced war.

To be fair Covid-related news disappeared almost completely from the media of my country (Romania) once the crisis in Ukraine starting getting real serious.

This is what I see in my country (Czechia) as well. Right after covid propaganda started to collapse even in mainstream media, we have another distraction. In fact, we have here devastating inflation and prices of food going up like 20-50%. Last month I've got new prices for gas. Bill is 600% higher. But media don't care. It's ticking bomb for poverty.

Beside of this, our gonverment signed new law that is above our constitution and basically give ministry of health unlimited rights to close business, put individuals to quarantine by message and so on. For our safety, of course.

All EU countries have to signs those totalitarian laws: https://www.consilium.europa.eu/cs/policies/coronavirus/pand...

Anecdotal, but quite a few of twitter users I follow, particularly in the OSINT community, have said that they seem to be seeing less “patriotic American right wing” trolls (paraphrasing) in their mentions, etc, since the Russian twitter ban.

Admittedly, you would expect Russia to not block it’s own bot farms, but perhaps if the purpose of the trolls on twitter is primarily disinformation for internal consumption then maybe there is less need of them.

> have said that they seem to be seeing less “patriotic American right wing” trolls (paraphrasing) in their mentions, etc, since the Russian twitter ban

I've heard similar things, and it seems plausible, but I'd really like some solid data.

Yandex is concerned it go under too, which is an interesting side effect in the same vein.

Source: https://ir.yandex/press-releases?year=2022&id=03-03-2022

https://www-interfax-ru.translate.goog/russia/826411?_x_tr_s...

google translate link

Well, to the people in another thread worried about the US cutting off Russia from the internet, looks like Russia is going to do that themselves...

Facebook banned as well.

https://archive.ph/CxQMR

Reply on news.ycombinator.com