Twitter succumbs to Erdoğan’s pressure, silences key voices on election eve
turkishminute.com
turkishminute.com
Previously, the original domain eksisozluk.com was blocked and the reason given was "the site has unnaturally large number of critics". Once the appeals to the court failed, they switched to eksisozluk2023.com and it was fine for a while but tonight they blocked that domain too. Now the new domain is eksisozluk42.com
An interesting fact is, the website is run by a legal entity registered in Turkey, with physical offices in central Istanbul. They are known to run the website by the book and removing any content the court demands but the core principle is "anything legal goes". So it's quite a free speech platform, despite some controversies over they years.
It's ridiculous to have them blocked since they are %100 legal. The government literally just said "fuck it, just block it".
ROTFL
The previous regime at Twitter actually stood up to Erdogan.
The reality is not all countries have 1A like the US. Unfortunately, any social media, message app, etc... has to comply (to a certain extent) with the government and try as hard at it can not to compromise its values.
Twitter rejected demands from the Turkish government to open offices way back in 2014 because they knew it was a risk.
And also technically doesn't matter, him not being a free speech absolutist still stands true
This situation reminds me of the trolley problem.
like wikipedia? https://www.reuters.com/article/turkey-wikipedia/turkish-cou...
There is a time and a place for posturing. Choosing to block access to a popular opposition platform on the eve of a very meaningful election is probably not it.
I know Elon has endlessly declared himself a free speech absolutist, but to me this seems like a perfect test case of “free speech maximalist” vs “free speech absolutist” - in general, the maximalist preference is 100% > 99% > 98% > … > 1% > 0%, while the absolutist preference is 100% > 0% > 1-99%. If he thinks his decision here is obviously correct then he’s actually a maximalist, not an absolutist like he so often claimed.
(Personally, I think this is a surprisingly sensible approach. I’ve long thought maximalism to be superior to absolutism, almost everywhere. In the case of free speech on the internet in particular, I take it as axiomatic that “The internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it”, and consider it an obvious corollary that minimizing the amount of damage results in the most efficient and rapid re-routing.)
1: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1657422401754259461 2: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1657428707995181058
the term is: hypocrisy
I suppose they could drag their feet a day or two until after the election, but after that, they'd be subject to fines, complete blocks of the site (like what happened to Wikipedia[2] for almost three years), and who knows what else. They could attempt to fight this in Turkish courts, but that might be futile.
1. https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/a/2014/challenging-t... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_of_Wikipedia_in_Turkey
Just to be clear, I don’t think Musk did wrong, I think he is just a businessman who pretends to be an activist as part of his branding. He did a simple business calculation and concluded that the damage to the brand is less than the revenue from the Turkish market.
The statistical likelihood of him not being a white supremacist alt-right crank is … lim -> 0 when looking at his entire corpus of work
Erdogan meddles (with only partial success, hopefully) or Erdogan blocks? What’s worse?
a) economic b) legal c) selective-outrage judicial/law enforcement d) personal bias (of the execs)
In US, before Musk -- Twitter was succumbing to (c) and (d) During Musk era, in US -- Twitter is facing (a) (c) (d) . Although it seems that (a) is not that strong/relevant.
In Turkey, today, Twitter is facing ( b ) and ( c ).
--
As users and observers we have to realize these pairs (Country + Pressure type union) and make relevant conclusions about the Country and about Twitter execs.
We cannot just remove the 'type' system out of these, and make conclusions.
All that outrage and righteous indignation, and for what? to do a 180 and claim that "Twitter is just a cold-hearted business, free speech or not"? Really? Any reflecting on THAT?
The problem is that there's so much overlap between the people who think that court decision was wrong and that the bakery should have had to bake the gay cake and the people who support Twitter's ban of Trump. If you think something is unfair/unjust/unconstitutional/whatever and that it should be undone/repealed/overturned, then you shouldn't argue for other things using that thing as precedent. It's dishonest to say both "Y is okay because X is okay and X is basically the same as Y" and "X isn't okay".
As opposed to shrieking "bloody murder, the commies are coming for our tweets, are they going to shoot us next, we are being muzzled." The drama that came with a business decision was just over-the-top.
So if you think is fine, okay, but I don't want to hear an outrage ever again about someone being deplatformed. It's not against the law or the Constitution.