Twitter Steps Down From the Free Speech Party
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But in this case, what we see is a situation where we'd like to see Twitter stand up to various world governments... perhaps even the US government. But we all know that, in the end, there's a limit to how much they can contest the will of the government because the governments are the ones with "men with guns".
Maybe companies / corporations with enough power to actually challenge the governments of the world isn't such a bad thing after all. Or, perhaps it would be better to say "maybe corporations with enough power to challenge the governments of the world" is, at least, not a universally bad thing.
Reminds me of the ludicrous scenario for Deus Ex Human Revolution. Nation States (at least in developed countries) are concentrating far more power than most multinational companies anyway, so I'd say anything that puts some balance of power is probably a good thing.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/in-s-korea-the-republic-...
Corporations are under no such compulsion. Their sole motive is profit. Put Wal-Mart in charge, and they'll happily kill half the population and feed them to the other half if the accountants say it will cut costs somehow. Yeah, every now and then you get someone with a conscience in charge of a big company, but if you're going to rely on that you might as well just cut out the middleman and go straight to a "benevolent" dictatorship.
Oh, the other thing you missed is that most corpocracy scenarios (including the one that we're actually living in) aren't about corporations standing up to the government, but about them using money and influence to make sure that the government does what's best for the corps instead of what's best for the people. Giving the corps more power doesn't create a balance, it just makes it easier for them to pull the puppet strings.
On a related note, if we look at corporations as nations with citizens being their employees, then actually they work in a more similar way to a government - they usually provide healthcare, define certain laws (as in, rules and dependencies within the corporation itself) and seek to make their employees happy (or else employees will go to other company). And additionally people don't get so zealously protective about their corporations as they do about nations, so maybe rather than waging wars they would choose to simply change the corporation they are in.
Well, I certainly don't say we should make a change in this direction though; it's simply a thought I find interesting, how corporations provide to their employees some of the things similarly as the government does (and sometimes provide even though the government should, but doesn't).
All of the dominant American online service already come with their own built-in ideological censorship, usually under the euphemism "family-friendly". (Twitter is actually one of the most tolerant services.)
People can challenge the governments of their own countries quite well, thankyouverymuch. It may take time, but in the end they are a big fat easy target.
Challenging global corporations is a lot more terrifying. So far the only thing that has helped us fight back has been... governments.
We should never expect corporations to take on the role of challenging the government. In "democracies", this is the role of the citizen (whose responsibility is to vote). Corporations, on the other hand, are controlled by people with lots of money whose goal it is to make even more money.
I don't see why we shouldn't expect corporations to take on the role of challenging the government. It is in Twitter's interest for governments not to crack down on free speech. So when governments do crack down, it is in their interest to stand up to those governments, especially when they don't have any employees or assets in those countries.
One worry would be that the Russian government could threaten Twitter with cyberattacks.
Article shows otherwise, it is not in Twitter's interest to worsen relationships with any government by refusing to comply with requests. Providing some evidence would be helpful.
Please review the history of the various "East India" companies. I think you will find it an enlightening read.
I have, actually. What's interesting to me is that it really points out the inherent paradox, in that corporations (as we know them today anyway) actually owe their existence to the State. With the East India Company it was a Royal Charter.
Note that I'm just playing "Devil's Advocate" here to some extent. I'm not necessarily a fan of super-huge corporations with Nation-State level power. In fact, I'm not necessarily a fan of any entity having "Nation-State level power", including Nation-States! :-)
Again, I'm not arguing for corporations like that. I'm just interested in the discussion vis-a-vis how power can/should/might be organized and controlled.
Rather than having indirect power that can be stolen, people need direct local power that has consequences with transparent effects.
Big nations, and corporations, we allow them to exist, and some of us, sometimes myself, think they are good for us. It just makes me sad how passive and accepting we are in this regard, and how current culture enables small companies quickly rise to into position to serve yet another brand of Soma.
a) Twitter's job is to make money; carrying your latest 140-char call to arms 'normally' helps, but if in some circumstance it doesn't, they won't
b) Corporations (and actually, at the end of the day, all capitalist enterprises) are by definition reliant on the state, so you would expect them to compromise when the merde hits the fan.
So, colour me unsurprised. Yes, in theory I would like Twitter to stand up to oppressive state regimes. My political beliefs are as they are, in part, because I know they won't.
The problems start when governments and corporations merge.
In theory Twitter could bribe these governments, but that would be morally worse (and legally worse) than caving.
Corporations are entities who owe their existence to government and can be terminated at a whim by government. If the government chartering a corporation decides it shouldn't continue to exist, it doesn't exist anymore.
This gets obscured a lot by the fact that the same class of people that derive the most benefit from the existence of corporations also have disproportionate power over government, so that this power is very rarely exercised, but that's not because corporations are powerful enough to resist government or even theoretically could be, its because corporations and governments ultimately are run by the same people.
Yeah that's the way it works today and in Real Life. Clearly the cyberpunk scenario is a hypothetical, but it might not be as far-fetched as it seems.
Whether it's a Good Idea or not is, obviously a big question.
Yes, corporate charters have been revoked for failure to comply with legal requirements. AFAIK, the most recent period of time during which this (sometimes referred to as the "corporate death sentence") was an actively-pursued remedy for violations of the law in the US (though it is one on the books still in, I believe, all states) is the late 19th and early 20th century [1].
[1] Some New York cases discussed starting on p. 250 (of the source document, not the PDF) under "Revocations Based on Misuse of the Corporate Charter for Violations of State Law": http://digitalcommons.pace.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1...
The only solution to that problem that I can think of is to better educate the end user, and to make them see that even though company X's shiny product seems better right now, in the long term there is everything to lose by using their communication systems. That's a hard fight though.
Believe it or not, people are actually kind of rational, and pick product A over B for some real reason. Usually B, if feature equivalent or even feature advanced of A, has a hideous UX (command line, really?) and/or visual design (e.g. ugly fake chrome). It might also not be up to date on what is in fashion, but we don't buy unfashionable cars either unless we are going for something retro (part of our culture); consider that "the shiny" at your own peril.
After all, Gmail may have its problems, especially recently with Google+, but it interoperates with every other email service (and until recently, Jabber client) and is relatively easy to move off of; for most of its 10 years of existence, I'd say it had a positive role in keeping people using email. It's far, far better than something like Twitter where the platform owner has absolute control and can censor tweets or arbitrarily crack down on third party clients.
Similarly, while App.net didn't exactly replace Twitter, I think I think its emphasis on encouraging people to write independent clients for it was very healthy for it (and while some of those clients were proprietary, proprietary native clients for open platforms are far less bad than proprietary platforms). Why didn't tent.io try to launch with spiffy clients?
To be honest, I don't think it's as much that open can't be shiny as that creating a social platform without an existing userbase to leverage is nearly impossible - most closed platforms fail too. And I think most developers know that shiny is necessary - it's just that there isn't enough motivation and enthusiasm. But it's unreasonable to expect anyone to use your platform if you're not going to spend enough engineering effort on it...
Wait, so calling for the destruction of Capitalism is illegal now in Russia?
That might be news to the quarter of the Duma who are Communists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Party_of_the_Russian...
Oh, and in my opinion, Communist Party of Russian Federation is about communism as much as Liberal-Democratic Russian Party is about liberalism or democracy. That is, not really.
The case for free speech is important, but it's dissapointing to see foreign powers with huge resources sponsor whole campaigns and try to influence public opinion, policy and election outcomes in third countries, trying to get friendly lackeys in power.
In tons of countries where there are large external "strategic interests" wanting to rip them off, there are paid (or indirectly sponsored through other means) "activists" and "vocal minority leaders" that are used as propaganda personel for foreign powers.
So it's not enough that speech should be free -- it should also be independent.
As much as it sucks that Twitter is forced to do this, the government of neither Russia or Pakistan has a legal system which I would trust to fully respect the rule of law in this matter--either is likely to simply block the service if the requests are not acknowledged.
As principled as Google's stand was in refusing to pull an offensive video, it probably did more to stifle the free flow of information than had they pulled the "offensive" video on request. At least that way people would have an idea of which specific videos the government didn't want them to see, rather than the entire site being blocked out.
Only in China do you have a population so brainwashed that they think these things are being done for their benefit. Russians have an active dissent. Feed it; It will bear fruit.
That's just sad.
Russia? Not so much I think.
Well, and only in America they believe such naive things.
For one, Russian people voted predominantly for Putin. The "dissent" you mention is mostly the US promoting some of his political rivals, feeding them (you nailed that one) and over-playing them for western audiences, so as to make a big fuss out of nothing to try to influence Russian policy for its own purposes. That's 90% of the "active dissent".
And China is a world player. They want (and deserve) their own Google or Twitter, not to be tied to externally controlled services. (Of course people whose own country is doing the controlling will disagree). Those kind of actions enable local players to sweep the market (why send control of internet search and ads to Mountain View?).
It definitely feels like a lose-lose situation for liberty when governments can pressure websites to censor at the risk of a total block.
Google is currently working on a crowdsourced proxy called uProxy in order to push back against censorship. If uProxy succeeds, it will no longer be necessary to meet censors half way.