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Comment by cactusplant7374 | Hacker News Reader

Twitter appears to have complied with removing the BBC documentary tweets for users in India. So some tweets are not available in India.

It does look like Wikipedia is ahead of Twitter in the free speech absolutist game if it prefers being blocked to compliance.

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You're comparing a group chat to an encyclopedia...

I'd describe Twitter as closer to a news site in the modern era. There are a lot of journalists and other important public figures sharing information there, and that's especially true for important live news events like earthquakes. (Twitter is the first place I check if I feel the house shake, for example.)

USGS has a much better site for that.

https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/map/

Twitter can actually be faster than USGS, in my experience. USGS can have a several minute delay sometimes, and Twitter can be merely seconds late.

By this logic the sidewalk in front of a bunch of newspaper vending machines is also a news site.

From a market of ideas vs information horizon perspective it is.

I'd say it's more a bulletin or news board than a news website itself. Journalists don't work for Twitter and write news articles, they just share it via Twitter as a medium.

Absolutely not. A news site presumes that a majority of the content on there is vetted, researched, and somewhat accurate within the bounds of typical news bias.

Twitter is an open platform that anyone can say anything on. It's a social media site, and people happen to post their personal stories/experiences. Nothing more. I believe we wouldn't have such issues with misinformation if people stopped giving so much weight to everything they read on Twitter/Reddit/Facebook/etc.

> A news site presumes that a majority of the content on there is vetted, researched, and somewhat accurate within the bounds of typical news bias.

I don't know where you live, but here a news site is a site following political views or creating new stories which have nothing to do with reality.

"researched, and somewhat accurate" is below 1 pecent of the site content.

the presence of journalists does not make twitter a "news" site. Twitter is a firehose of misinformation and nonsense, a fraction of which has some value.

I agree with your point. But to be fair, many news sites are also a source of misinformation and nonsense, a fraction of which has some value. When hearing any news, I think it's important to get some independent verification before doing anything serious with it. News sites should be doing that verification, but they are strongly pressured to get news out fast, and verification often suffers.

> You're comparing a group chat to an encyclopedia...

Wikipedia is also a "grup chat". Just look at the history of any page. (Hint: discussion).

So yes, that is a chat. However, >99.9% of views of Wikipedia are not the history/chat. Less sure about this one, but probably greater than 99% of people using Wikipedia don't even know that that exists.

Specifically with respect to receiving censorship demands from foreign governments, what is the meaningful difference between the two?

One of them is an encyclopedia.

I'm asking you to explain why that difference is relevant to the consideration of receiving censorship demands from foreign governments. In my view, there is no relevant difference and both organizations should refuse these demands.

Wikipedia has become closer to group chat. And twitter closer to valuable dissemination of first person content.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictions_of_the_end_of_Wiki...

> encyclopedia

Encyclopedias are not warped to fit a minority groups opinion like Wikipedia is. Wikipedia is a website, not a trusted source. Not sure when Wikipedia became something more than a crowdsourced opinion site.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_of_Wikipedia

I think he always specified that it was within the limits of local laws. Were the links removed for every country, or just in india?

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