Twitter has approved 83% of censorship requests by authoritarian governments | Hacker News Reader

Twitter has approved 83% of censorship requests by authoritarian governments

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27 pointsbelter12 comments

Yeah they blocked urls of the BBC documentary critical of Modi just to not damage his image....like the man is not a a dictator impervious to critique

BBC did a report on global voter fraud a while ago. #1 culprit; mail in ballots. Good luck finding that article today. It also talked about international inspectors but not in the US. Only in the "meager" countries...meh.

> Good luck finding that article today.

Do you happen to have a link?

Found it.

   https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-37243190

BBC articles are not deleted, even if the subject was considered "wrong" it would still be on the site -- albeit in the archive for a very small number (<15) specific articles which were found to either be defamatory or broke editorial policy on misleading content.

> In the year prior to Musk taking control, Twitter agreed to 50% of such requests, in line with the compliance rate indicated in the company’s last transparency report (none have been published since October 2022). Following the change of ownership, that figure has risen to 83%, according to the analysis of the data by the technology information portal Rest of World.

Idk how the "analysis of the data" was done though

The relative shares are irrelevant. Instead:

"Since Musk’s takeover, the company has received 971 requests from governments (compared to only 338 in the six-month period from October 2021 to April 2022), fully acceding to 808 of them and partially acceding to 154."

A total of 971 requests is clearly a negligible amount for any platform with a global reach and a huge volume of content. Furthermore, among these requests is probably things that would be considered illegal also in terms of US law.

The analysis is probably based on the company's transparency report.

As someone downvoted me, let's put a little perspective to my argument: Facebook filed a total of 239,388 government requests to user data in Jul-Dec 2022. Orders of magnitude.

https://transparency.fb.com/data/government-data-requests/

And also completely different things. FB’s requests are for user data. Governments requesting user data is a completely normal thing (as long as it goes through proper legal means) since well before the internet even existed.

That’s completely different from government requests to censor information.

True enough. But I still consider <1000 censorship requests a small amount. For instance, the numbers for YouTube are staggering:

https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2022/09/youtubes-late...

In contrast, censorship requests by open, freedom-loving governments are so obviously a good thing and in the best interest of their citizens, that they don't even merit mentioning.

https://kolektiva.social/@BigJesusTrashcan/11042200223272872...

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