Twitter isn't Censoring You. Your Government is.
thenextweb.com
thenextweb.com
That they aren't says a lot to me. Their priorities are revenue, regardless of their stated abhorrence of censorship.
Probably longer than it would take to develop local clones of those services.
As a side note, I do not think it would be appropriate for a foreign corporation to try to influence national politics of a free and democratic country like Germany. While it's not entirely rational, especially an American corporation. IMVHO Twitter, Google et al. should conform to the law, it's up to German citizens to change the rules accordingly to their will and values.
Saying "I won't be part of your censorship regime" is not the same thing as trying to influence another country's democratic politics. They can take what I have to offer or leave it, but I'll be damned if I'll sacrifice my integrity for a dollar. This is probably the reason I haven't ever run a company. Yet...
Of course I would not run a business in a country where innocent people are being intentionally killed by the government. Not even on principle, thought that too, but simply because of the risk to me personally, my employees and general uncertainty.
Your message to the world is that if we violate your laws, you will subject us to your justice system.
Now we have a US company that does business in other countries, and those countries have laws that differ from yours. Why shouldn’t they comply with those country’s laws when the do business there, just as you expect companies in foreign jurisdictions to comply with American laws when they do business with your citizens?
My feeling is that if you don’t want Twitter censoring Nazi discussions in Germany, hand back the Canadian who sold marijuana seeds by mail to Americans.
A Canadian arrested and extradited by the Canadian authorities, according to agreements signed by the Canadian government elected by the Canadian people. While there is something to be said about American government lobbying around the world for laws and regulation beneficial to its interests, at least as perceived by the bureaucrats, it does not happen without the cooperation of (usually) democratically elected officials in other countries.
All I’m saying is that if you take the position that US companies should not be required to comply with the local laws of their users, then you should take the position that foreign companies need not be required to comply with American laws.
Either that, or hope that Twitter’s executives never hop on a flight to China and have it touch down in Frankfurt.
On the other hand, refusing to do business in oppressive locales is not the same as extraditing foreign nationals for breaking laws they had no say in and that technically shouldn't even apply to them. One is bad, the other is... not bad, to say the least.
That various cases you refer to seem wrong (I don't really have all the data) but I'm not clear why they make it OK for Twitter to potentially censor dissent in a dictatorship, for example.
I don't know about that, but Twitter has already raised questions over the practicality of English "super-injunctions": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_British_privacy_injunction...
I guess it's less palatable to censor tweets about Ryan Giggs than tweets praising the Nazis, though.
What the article points out is that for people opposed to sensorship, it's more productive to stop governments from sensoring, rather than pressure Twitter. If Twitter goes away, there is no guarantee other companies won't sensor things as well.
They do have to. That is a special feature of governments: they can compel compliance.
Sure: Twitter could just leave Germany. But does that end the censorship? No. It's still there; the only difference is that Twitter is gone. Good for Twitter's moral superiority, bad for everything else.
And let's not kid ourselves about how important Twitter, Facebook, and Google are. German restrictions on Nazi-related speech have been around long before the Internet and Twitter. They are not likely to end because of these companies.
Companies like these are only important to the extent that they empower individual people. To the extent they've assisted social change, like in Arab states, they've done it by being in-country and available to citizens. Not by pulling out in protest.
Laws are changed by people, not by tools. If the people have tools, but don't use them to change the law, that's the people's fault--not the tool.
I'm with Dave Winer on this one:
http://scripting.com/stories/2012/01/27/onTwittersNewFilteri...
Although Twitter says they will provide removal requests to the Chilling Effects site, I remain skeptical. If nothing else, this seems akin to the increasingly mandated "protest areas" in the U.S. and elsewhere that are well, or thoroughly, removed from the events being protested.
It's probably not a coincidence, but I bet the US Government wanting to censor tweets from certain groups in the Middle East for "spreading propaganda" has a lot to do with it, too. And I'm a lot more worried about that than about a certain country wanting to censor their own people's tweets, because at least then that country's citizens can protest against it. Not much another country can do about US censoring their tweets.
If so, an enterprising group of people will probably be able to make Twitter hide terms that, currently, are utterly unrelated to forbidden terms.
The fun's over. We've been discovered.
Once every single packet in the entire network requires authentication to move, and they outlaw any kind of network that doesn't require this authentication, then Pandora's box will be shut again
Was pretty happy with the outrage at SOPA, I just wish it was 'stop censorship' instead of stop SOPA because the buzz seems to have died off even with ACTA gettting signed left right and center
Twitter complying with requests to pre-emptively filter tweets would fall under "twitter is censoring itself".