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Twitter Enables Censorship, Boycotts Begin
Reversing its position and heading down a slippery slope
Social media website Twitter announced Thursday that it will begin blocking certain messages (tweets) on a country-to-country basis. Twitter has been known as a vehicle for free speech as well as a source for social and political organizing -- notably during the protests in 2011 from the Egyptian uprising to Occupy Wall Street. Governments will now request Twitter to take down certain 'illegal' tweets, which will be blocked from its citizens but may still be visible by users outside of the censored country. Many have now raised concerns that this will open the door for repressive governmental censorship, in some ways defeating the benefits of Twitter all together.
This is a sudden reverse in policy for Twitter who has previously boasted its capacity for free speech.
Users across the world are beginning the protest and a Twitter boycott has been planned for tomorrow.
* * *
The UK Independent reports:
In a statement published online the San Francisco-based company told users that it could now “reactively withhold content from users in a specific country.” Twitter defended the technology as a way of ensuring the maximum possible audience could view its content whilst adhering to specific laws in different countries.
Previously when Twitter was forced to delete a tweet it would be taken down worldwide. Now individual tweets can be blocked in specific countries with Twitter promising to flag when a comment is taken offline.
An example Twitter gave was Germany where glorification of Nazism or publishing Hitler’s Mein Kampf, for example, is illegal. If a tweet broke German law, Twitter could block users in Germany from reading the tweet but continue to allow others worldwide to see it. [...]
Free speech advocates expressed concerns that the new technology would encourage repressive governments to insist that Twitter take down critical content especially given the website’s role in helping to organize mass protests during last year’s Arab Spring.
“Whilst censoring tweets that break the law in individual countries is preferable to taking down the content altogether, we’re going to be monitoring this very closely to ensure that Twitter’s commitment to free speech isn’t watered down,” said Mike Harris, head of advocacy at Index on Censorship.
* * *
UK's Sky News reports:
The move to censor certain tweets is a significant change from its position during the Arab Spring in 2011, where protesters in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere used Twitter to co-ordinate demonstrations.
As the protests gathered momentum last January, Twitter signaled it would take a hands-off approach to censoring content in a blog post entitled The Tweets Must Flow.
"We do not remove tweets on the basis of their content," the blog post read.
Some users are calling on fellow Twitterers to silence their tweets on January 28 as a way of expressing their opposition to Twitter's plan. They are using the hashtag #TwitterBlackout to organize the boycottIt added: "Our position on freedom of expression carries with it a mandate to protect our users' right to speak freely and preserve their ability to contest having their private information revealed."
But now a new blog post by Twitter said: "Starting today, we give ourselves the ability to reactively withhold content from users in a specific country while keeping it available in the rest of the world."
* * *
A boycott of Twitter has now been planned and will go into affect tomorrow. Huffington Post writes:
Twitterers have a message: Tomorrow, turn off the tweets.
Users of the social media site are planning a Twitter boycott to protest the company's new ability to censor tweets on a country-by-country basis. [...]
Some users are calling on fellow Twitterers to silence their tweets on January 28 as a way of expressing their opposition to Twitter's plan. They are using the hashtag #TwitterBlackout to organize the boycott, and tweets tagged with the hashtag are rolling in at a clip of about 12 per minute. The tweets span a range of languages, including English, German, Spanish and Arabic.
The protest follows less than two weeks after thousands of websites, including Wikipedia, Google, and Reddit, protested two controversial anti-piracy bills, the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act, by shutting down or posting notices outlining the downsides of the proposed legislation. Google alone managed to secure more than 7 million signatures for an online petition opposing the bills, and tweets about SOPA and PIPA numbered in the hundreds of thousands the day of the protest.
Yet this online protest, and others like it, have relied on Twitter as a means of communicating between protestors and buttressing support for their movements.
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49 Comments so far
Show AllHate to break it to you, but the bombs and bullets ARE the 'civilized' means of settling of differences. Free speech is only guaranteed between equals, and friend, you are not an equal to the Elite and their Police bulldogs. Violence is only acceptable in this Corporate pseudo-culture when it flows from the top down, unidirectionally. The people further down the social ladder are forbidden to defend themselves with anything more than words. If they do, they are called terrorists. Get it?
From British Diggers in 1649, to Boston in 1776, to Paris in 1789 to Chicago in 1877, St. Petersburg in 1917, Dublin in 1919, Algiers in 1954, Chicago again in 1968 to Seattle in 1999 to Nader's best election turnout in 2000, all successful organizing was done through these quaint things called flyers, pamphlets and samizat, and wheat-pasted posters and meetings in rooms and homes.
I was a Nader organizer in Pittsburgh in 2000. We had no Twitter or Facebook, just printed flyers, posters, yard signs and this new thing called e-mail listservers. I never recall any problems organizing or mobilizing lots of poeple. Same with all the huge antiwar mobilizations from 2001 through 2005 - no Twitter, no Facebook. Just our flyers, wheat-pasting onto walls and traffic signal boxes, e-mail lists, and the truly independent, non-capitalist Indymedia system - which, due to facebook and twitter- addiction has been allowed to fall into spam-filled disrepair.
If anything, evidence points to social media as being damaging to organizing, becasue it creates a comforting, disabling delusion serious organizing is being accomplished hunkered over a keyboard clacking away in the comfort of their homes -and doing NOTHING else.
And at any rate, Twitter and facebook are private, capitalist organizations - they can, and will, delete or censor anything they want on their private property! Also, they are practically designed for the purpose of spying, yet people have been drawn into them like mindless roaches to a roach hotel! Do you honestly believe, for crying out loud, that they will allow any activist use of their utilities once we become a serious threast to the economic status quo their business relies on? And if they do allow us to continue to use then, it is only for the purpose of spying???
The internet is useful to organizing - but _only_ if we return to non-corporate owned utilities like e-mail and the Indymedia system with a robust syatem of mirror servers (similar to wikileaks). Perferably all communication should be over traditional copper wire lines, where common carrier laws still apply so they cannot be legally blocked, and even wiretapping requires at least some (albeit not much) due process.
This crap just keeps creeping in. When the illegal unconstitutional and mis-named Patriot Act was put in place, those of us that protested were told by many, "What are you worried about? As long as you don't break the law, you have nothing to worry about."
My answer to that was, and is, what happens if they change the law? What happens if, for instance, the American Friends Service Committee is suddenly declared a terrorist supporting group or sympathizer? What if you have financially supported the AFSC, the ACLU, and other groups? Suddenly they are banned and you, who have supported them, suddenly find yourself a "terrorist sympathizer" with your bank accounts frozen and perhaps a gulag in your future?
This crap just grows and grows, and we get used to it and it grows some more.
Most of their supporters are already on domestic terrorist watch lists. That all happened a few decades ago.
Why the amnesia of past organizing? Why are we trying to re-invent the wheel???
No one is trying to reinvent the wheel. Twitter has its uses precisely because you aren't generally sitting in front of a computer and a keyboard when tweeting, you are likely to be tweeting from a phone. That is why the 140 character limit isn't much of an issue: no one wants to or is going to type out a long winded message from their phone.
There are some situations where twitter works more quickly than most other forms of communication. To give an example, there is a country whose politics I follow very closely. Recently, as in the last few hours, a group of indigenous protesters staged a protest against logging occurring in their area; they put up a road blockade to prevent the logging company from encroaching on their land. They were arrested by the police. They happened to be wise enough / fortunate enough to have a lawyer with them, a lawyer who had in the past worked in indigenous human rights issues. She got arrested by the police too. She got harassed, the police attempted to intimidate her. The police attempted to deny the right of the protesters to legal representation. She sent a distress message to a colleague / fellow activist in a legal human rights group. That colleague then twitted the issue, and various lawyers involved in human rights (re)tweeted, and managed to get a legal aid lawyer on the way to the incident. The legal representative of the political party in charge of that area then got involved. All this happened in a few hours. And all throughout, the lawyers in that legal aid human rights group kept up a series of updates on what was happening. Try to organise such a response standing out by the street corner with a poster. Or even email or calling people by phone.
Twitter has many flaws, you certainly won't use twitter only to organise. That does not mean that it has no uses.
And, it is the fault of the activists themselves that they cannot manage the indymedia sites. As I wrote, I have been fully willing to take over management of the Indymedia Pittsburgh site, but my goddamn e-mails are not answered!
https://twitter.com/#!/search?q=%23temiarblockade
https://twitter.com/#!/search/realtime/%23temiarblockade
You might not understand some of the posts due to context or language.
Or better yet, don't use twitter, facebook or any other social networking crap.
Please, PLEASE learn the terrain of the battlefield!!!
What i'm trying to say is that while our home copper line may be subject to some laws and regulations (which may be broken at any time), the connection from a data center to the internet's main pipes are fiber optic, so data can be filtered on the server before it hits copper lines. Another way would be to remove the website from server altogether which SOPA was all about.
One of the largest data centers in the world is Softlayer headquartered in Dallas who recently bought out ThePlanet who were a huge data center by themselves.
Common carriage refers to the obligation under law to provide a carriage service (typically freight, passenger or telecommunication voice or data) to any paying customer regardless of the specific message, cargo, person, etc. Of course, it also means allowing authorities the same unimpeded access to the utility to wiretap, intercept dangerous or illegal freight, etc. within limits of local laws (i.e. the First and Fourth Amendments etc.) - but the carrier can't. This is why the passenger and luggage checkpoints at airports must be run by a government authority an not the airlines themselves.
In the alternative, private contract carriage, these rules don't apply.
Common carriage was a major bulwark of free speech for years, but with the rise of digital communications in the 1990s, it has been rendered largely dead in what is probably one of the great quiet disasters for free speech of our time. Much of this was accomplished through Clinton's 1996 Telecommunications Act. So in may ways, we are 16 years too late in protesting.
We have quietly been forced into private contract carriage - with most poeple not even knowing what was going on. And now we have a whole generation of young people don't know any other telecommunication regime but private contract carriage, but strangely, expect them to act like common carriers! That is the source of the exasperation in my post 2 days ago.
That ISP and data centers are _not_ common carriers always seemed strange to me - particularly how I now only have a two monopoly choices for an ISP - Verizon and Comcast - but my understanding is that this is only because of fairly arbitrary court rulings, and under a different political regime, could change.
So I guess for now, common carriage in the digital data context is down to only peer-to-peer communication over ordinary telecom voice lines - i.e. phone modems - a very severe restriction. But, even this will go away when we are all forced to go to Verizon FIOS - this is why Verizon is pushing FOIS so hard. For now, at least the last bit of the link of my DSL service is common-carrier copper wires, and I am going to cling to that as long as possible. For now, don't throw out those old USR 56k modems.
More info:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_carrier
A prophetic 1994 paper (which I need to study more) on the topic is here:
http://www.columbia.edu/dlc/wp/citi/citinoam11.html
I think that new laws conferring common carriage to digital data centers will be the only way we will ever protect ourselves from arbitrary control of telecommunication in the future.