Yet another example of how good intentions aren’t enough. You need to fully understand the situation before you act, especially when dealing with a situation that is different from what you are familiar with.
The thing is we don‘t know either way.
A guy is quietly abducted by an authoritarian regime.
Naturally, the smart response would be for "activists" to "help" him by erasing all public record of his existence.
I was unable to edit my top-level comment, otherwise I would have added an explanation. Thanks.
It would also prevent their account being used to access any private accounts they may follow.
It's about terror and control, not about justice. If you think that's bad wait till you see what the Khmer Rogue did in Cambodia. The precious framework of individual rights, a relatively functioning justice system, and constitutional guarantees may not be perfect here in the US of A, there are issues, and those rights are still being eroded, and we have work to do, but people who draw comparisons between places like the US and China or Iran clearly have no idea what they are talking about, and it's a decent chance they may in fact be part of state sponsored psychological warfare apparatuses.
If you serve customers in another country, their laws apply. You can either follow the law or not serve in that country. This is pretty much how it has worked forever.
This is obviously not great if you have a set of less-restrictive and more-restrictive laws that contradict each other. And it's not great if values, politics and rights in general aren't compatible. As much as we can disagree with what mass-murdering authoritarian regimes are up to, unless we go to war (after we have already applied all the sanctions we can think of) there isn't much you can do about it.
As for who might care: twitter might. They may have to spend more money on defence, on screening people when hiring them, and on legal to make sure they aren't getting sued in the US for discrimination, data leaks or whatever else people might come up with if they keep (accidentally) hiring foreign intelligence officers without checking who they are.
You are right.
Now, Twitter is free to not follow this law and expect consequences: a law suit from Iran, or retaliation towards Twitter operations on Iranian ground.
Unless you can point to a treaty between the US and Iran that lets Iran sue US companies, or some other way that Iran can actually enforce a judgement on Twitter, then no, Twitter has no need to respect Iran's laws. About the only way I see is for Iran to firewall Twitter wholesale, but isn't the wholesale end-user Internet shutdown basically doing that?
This isn't really a "but it's the law!"-case, it's a country A wants something, and they might use whatever they have to get it. The US has sanctions, but Iran doesn't except maybe oil production, but there are other places where you can get oil. So if Iran has nothing they can deny anyone else, they resort to attacks.
So when Iran says "do this because it is our law", you might not do it because you are interested in their laws nor do you have to follow them (legally), but you might not want the expense of being targeted by them.
As to the law of the jungle, if embedded Iranian agents have enough power to do anything to Twitter, then the right framing is that Twitter has a massive security problem. Also it would be foolish of Iran to burn such resources on damaging Twitter rather than continuing to silently exfiltrate data that interests them.
If Iran performs arbitrary attacks on hospitals in "retaliation" for Twitter's actions, then that still doesn't affect Twitter. And similarly, that's best framed as said hospitals having abysmal security, rather than focusing blame on Iran. The Internet is hostile noise.
No, it implies that if you respect the laws of the countries the people you serve reside in, you can choose to follow the law by not serving them, and therefore not having to "do what they say", or serve them, but then by their laws "do what they say".
Regarding effects on Twitter: it costs them money. Their share prices drop and jo-jo a ton when stuff like this gets out. Legally, not much effects twitter, it's not a person after all, and legal departments weasel their way around plenty to make sure a company keeps existing and keeps making money. If it's cheaper to censor some random person on your private platform then compared against shoring up your cyber defences, that's an easy choice for the people in charge with somewhat cartoonish dollar signs in their eyes.
The reality is that nothing is truly isolated from side-effects and circumstances in the world. Even if there are no diplomatic ties, and no physical violence, it's all happening on the same globe with the same internet. So ignoring laws is not always the cheapest way to deal with countries, and not dealing with countries is generally not an option when you're connected online.
This is only a real dichotomy if there is a legal enforcement regime forcing one to choose.
You're substituting a few handwavey indirections to profit-based incentives. While partially true, this mainly functions to absolve Twitter from not taking a more principled stand - the same argument could be made if they started doing more deplorable things with user data.
So sure, the stock market is fickle and irrational, like every herd. But the fundamental analysis for Iran being able to attack Twitter is that Twitter has poor security, period. I'd rather focus on the real problem than merely shoot today's messenger.
Twitter, on the other hand, is known to be a massive censor, just like Youtube/Google.
Hopefully the authorities in Iran are similarly ignorant
When they arrest someone in a demonstration, they will confiscate their phone and open the apps on the device. If the account is inactive, they can not see anything.
May I ask you to delete your comment if that is not a problem? You basically gave the regime an evidence we said the activists are trying to hide away.