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Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

I'm going to guess this is more about Germany than it is about China

In Germany, Nazi propaganda is illegal. This leaves Twitter with three options when dealing with a user who posts Nazi propaganda:

1. Leave it up, in violation of German law. 2. Delete the user's tweet, even though it is legal in most countries (and blocking it is a violation of the principle of free speech) 3. Block it only in Germany, and make it clear that it has been blocked.

Personally I think 3 is the least-bad option, though obviously others may disagree.

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Yes. At Last.fm, Germany was the first country we had to censor our content in.

If you try and view content which is deemed inappropriate by the German government (fun fact: even the list of inappropriate content is restricted), you get something which looks like this:

http://www.lastfm.de/music/Landser

I believe these pages are still available if you try and visit the English last.fm site from Germany.

With counties bringing in even more restrictions on free speech which contradict each other this will be fun. Take the Armenian genocide for example. Denying it will be a crime in France, but claiming it happened can lead to charges of "insulting Turkishnes" in Turkey (the charges were later dropped against Orhan Pamuk).

Blocking those tweets is not a violation of the principle of free speech. At least not in the legal sense. Private people and companies suppress speech all the time and that's fine. It's when your government does it that it's very wrong.

What are you trying to say? Germany compels companies to suppress Nazi propaganda in Germany. (I'm assuming, the article isn't that specific.) That is the government telling citizens what they cannot say (e.g. censorship).

The difference between censored speech in Germany (or America: we have limits on free speech, too) and someplace like China is German society has agreed to limit certain offensive speech where as Chinese citizens don't really have a say in the matter.

It's a violation in the moral sense, depending of course in your morals. Twitter's image involves the protection if free speech, so it's problematic for them.

It's only a violation in so far as its less of a violation to a persons free speech than blocking the whole service.

Users can be creative with what they want to express with this approach - with no Twitter at all, where is the wiggle room?

Yes, but censorship is a slippery slope to silence and government abuse. Eventually Twitter and/or the People will need to make a stand against tyranny if they feel human rights and free speech are being overly obstructed.

The wiggle room is that maybe, when Twitter, Google and Facebook, and every other company that values free speech (if in fact they actually do) pulls out of their country, the citizens will realize how shitty their laws against free speech actually are, and have them repealed. Twitter may have principles, but they're sacrificing them here in favor of German/Chinese revenue.

I'm sympathetic to your point; people are so confused about this issue. If a reporter says something offensive on TV and gets fired as a result, it's not a violation of "free speech". In the present case, though, it is a violation of free speech—not by Twitter, but by the German government. (Good thing, too, as I hear the Nazis are rallying their forces and are on the brink of a comeback.)

It is when they do it because of German government coercion. So it is.

Exactly, Twitter is acting on behalf of Government. That doesn't somehow make it "ok" -- understandable? Yes. But it's not the same thing as a private enterprise deciding they don't want to republish Nazi tweets.

So if a Government told a newspaper that they couldn't run an editorial by a guest columnist, that wouldn't be suppressing free speech?

Twitter isn't doing this just for fun, they're doing it because of the policies and laws of the countries in which they operate.

If Twitter told it's users that they couldn't post bad things about Jack Dorsey that would be different.

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