No. It is the exact opposite of that. Western companies should stop promoting themselves as being of use to protestors and dissidents. Such users should not expect  western consumer products and platforms to be reliable, useful tools for political activity. They should be wary of support that presents itself as sincere but is really about marketing ‘iPod Liberalism’ to domestic U.S. audiences who like to hear it. Anyone who “easily imagines a world where a censored tweet becomes the ultimate protest symbol” are ridiculous.

That was an awfully long comment on a post you didn’t read.

First of all I find it rather naive to suggest that web services companies should not be allowed to set up shop abroad because those countries might censor speech. Anyone who followed the Wikileaks saga knows that the internet is already being censored by one government, so I don’t see what’d be so unetical about allowing other sovereign states the same privilege. Sure, the US has never censored political speech on Twitter – it has so far never had the need to do so to protect it’s geopolitical interests. No major American television network has devoted serious attention to Wikileaks, since they know they’d be branded as traitors or at least unpatriotic, irresponsible and lose access to politicians. That’s nothing new, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky wrote the book on it, called “Manufacturing Consent”. Additionaly, Paypal and credit card companies were pressured into refusing any payment to Wikileaks. Whereas censorship laws and injuctions should be viewed with suspicion in a democracy, “applying pressure” is not proscribed by law, not subject to a hearing in a court of law, cannot be challenged in parliament, hence is invariably the mark of thug rule. So, let’s not fool ourselves. Twitter, Facebook et al. are American ideological state apparatuses all the time, to borrow Althusser’s notion, and foreign policy tools some of the time. They will be forced into self-censorship if anything on it threatens American hegemony in the world or the status quo at home. It would have been interesting to see how devoted to freedom of speech Twitter and Facebook would have been had they been around in 2000 and had they been used to stage mass demonstrations against the theft of the 2000 presidential election.

Second, one has to seperate the abstract question of obeying local limits on freedom of speech from the worst aspect of it, i.e. facilitating broad censorship of political speech in authoritarian countries. France and Germany, for example, have laws criminalising “negationism”, which in practice usually means denying the Holocaust. For readers coming from an Anglo-American cultural background this may be rather hard to accept as legitimate, but in continental Europe it is nearly universally accepted that the guarantees of rights and freedoms set forth in the European Convention on Human Rights do not apply to those uses of said freedoms that seek to promote any political philosophy incompatible with a free society. Hence, free speech is not absolute. It’s a more vigilant form of democracy, for sure, but judging from the fact that elections in continental Europe’s established democracies are never determined by their supreme courts and that a real left-wing opposition is present, I would suggest that Americans are not in a position to question whether continental Europe meassures up to anyone’s standards of democracy. The notion of “censorship” that is often bandied about by internet free speech absolutists, the idea that every limit on free speech is Big Brother’s jackboot kicking dissenters in the face may have a lot of appeal in a thoroughly depoliticised society where everything government does is treated with suspicion and cynicism, but it conflates legitimate censorship with authoritarianism. Hence, Twitter’s decision to enter a pariticular foreign market should not be judged based on the fact that they have to obey foreign law per se, but rather on the kind of censorship it will be forced to impose. Censoring tweets linking to a video clip ridiculing a mentally retarded child, analogous to what Google has had to do, is certainly legitimate and the people behind Twitter should face criminal prosecution if they do facilitate such heinous crimes. It’s infinitely more legitimate than keeping the CCP in charge.

Under these rules, Twitter can turn around and say that they are complying with the letter of the law of DMCA takedown notices/Super-injunctions/etc etc (ad nauseum) in the regions affected by each law while those interested in seeing the material can still use a proxy to access it on the international versions of Twitter that are outside of the jurisdiction of each relevant law.

Arguably, the DMCA takedown notices are evidence that Twitter is being forced to censor its content already; all this decision does is make sure that Twitter are covering themselves legally, and are able to keep material online (0n its international servers, which can be accessed by proxy) that would otherwise have to be deleted. Why is this a problem?

There are very few countries on the planet with a good enough track record to be reasonably expected to pass your test. And Switzerland ain’t cheap my friend.

The ultimate question here is what Twitter actually is.

Twitter is a for-profit business that happened to be useful for a time as an activist platform.

If you want to change twitter’s mind, you’ll be able do it by affecting their bottom line or changing the laws under which they operate.

Twitter is *not* a non-profit with a binding mission statement.

*Billion dollar businesses are not entities capable of having values.*

People need a serious readjustment of their expectations.

The division of responsibility multiplied by the distance between the decision makers and outcomes means that businesses this size will never, ever act like a person, regardless of how well-intentioned any individual in the organization is.

Don’t anthropomorphize large businesses. They aren’t people. They don’t choose their values, because they are incapable of possessing them.

We need to understand them according to financial incentives and enforceable legal restrictions. That’s it.

P.S. I want to second all the props to Rob, all in all a great article. Media criticism is so crucial, the article lands right on target.

Top level DNS is held hostage in America, there’s little that individual actors can do about that.

There’s also the matter of The Pirate Bay’s founders prison sentences just having been made final. The Pirate Bay is the exception in these matters, not the rule – most people will shutter their doors rather than go to jail.

This is by no means a solved problem, and it won’t be until there’s a widely applicable model for censorship resistant website hosting/publishing. We aren’t there yet.

Centralized social networks beg for abuse, especially the kind we like to commit electronically these days.

no, but i remember Plurk. and once i don’t need Twitter anymore, it doesn’t matter what policy they choose to adopt next. i’m out of their loop.

I’m in no way agreeing with their solution here, I’m just trying to make it clear why exactly they are doing it — it’s not just the foreign offices.

Look at it this way: Twitter is currently blocked in places like China. So practically speaking, it’s already completely censored. Twitter agrees play ball, so China lets them operate. Everyone in China starts using Twitter.  Some tweets get censored, twitter follows China’s rules… but only for Chinese visitors.

The rest of the world finally gets the whole picture and there is a report of the censorship actions on Chilling Effects, so we know exactly what tweets to pay special attention to. Keep in mind the Internet is quick to remember, long to forget, and it always finds a way. If nothing else, technologies like TOR will allow people in China to read censored tweets.

Of course, it is possible to get around the Chinese block and use Twitter right now, but not for the layperson. Aside from obvious business growth, Twitter could possibly be creating a mechanism by which “censored” tweets will get spotlighted.

I will note though that Rob is still tweeting at the same frequency as he has been :)

You know, we value the service, and wish to continue using it. We can show that we care by continuing to use the service, but at the same time making it clear that censorship is unacceptable – which is what commentary like Rob’s here is valuable for.

There’s still time for them to backpeddle on this. As Rob suggests – all they have to do is not go down the road of being put in the position of having to censor anything. All it will take is to not set up marketing offices in countries with strong censorship atmospheres, and we all know which countries those are so it’s not like they’d be guessing.

Twitter is already blocked in China, which is probably the worst offender (China has two popular microblog services – the concept itself is huge, but it comes with the price of the government having direct access). This is the biggest question, to me – is it worse to have Twitter blocked entirely, or to have it be available but closely monitored for dissent?

Ideologically, anyway, it is better for it to be blocked entirely. As far as their bottom line goes, they have to decide if the ad revenue from these markets is worth the tarnished reputation they will have if they start to cave to censorship.

My account was disabled by Twitter a couple of months ago. I had been a user for many years, several hundred posts, several hundred followers, most of them mutual. I can’t see how a properly written spam bot would have flagged me – frankly I have no idea what I did “wrong.” As far as I can tell, neither does Twitter.

When this happened, ALL of my tweets were censored and I was unable to use the service for two weeks. After two weeks, I was reactivated. Twitter’s support people did not offer an explanation as to why my account was disabled. When asking for an explanation I was repeatedly sent a form email response referring to a long list of different Twitter rules from which I suppose I am to choose which one I might have violated.

I was lucky. While my account was down I searched for others with similar circumstances and found many. Some had been disabled for over a month. Others were never restored.

The best anyone has been able to offer is “Oh its a free service, you can’t expect them to care.”

But obviously a lot of people do.

How can Twitter be a platform from which you can speak truth to government power without fear of censorship when THEY arbitrary disable accounts for weeks at a time and when it happens, they can’t even be bothered to explain why they do it?

Perhaps Twitter had a political motivation for shutting my account down. Without any explanation, there is no way to know.

I’m not sure what you would like them to do.   Surely the fact that ‘large US company agrees to comply with local laws when doing business in other countries’ is only reasonable?

What we’d like them to do is not open offices in countries where there is even the possibility of them being required to censor messages.

Why does it have to open offices in Syria, Egypt, Iran, or anywhere else where they might face censorship? They are agreeing to allow whole countries worth of dissidents to be silenced because they hope for a little more advertising revenue in those countries.

EFF’s position is what has allowed many intelligent people, like your own Xeni Jardin, to support Twitter’s change in policy [1][2].

You who are all close to EFF (Cory?) need to press harder to get them to see that this is a terrible policy.

Everyone is acting as if this is a done deal, but just because a company has made an announcement doesn’t mean that enough internet outrage can’t reverse it — remember Qwikster?

But tulings from U.S. courts, sure.  The U.S. is where Twitter is and always was, so there was never any question about U.S. law’s applicability. 

Twitter’s got an excellent record of fighting foolish or over-reaching courts in the U.S., — a tradition we can at least hope it takes with it to other countries.

Fourth paragraph! Read the post, Mac!

Yes.

I can’t even believe that UK newspapers agree to this whole super injunction bollocks; let alone Twitter, a US based social network – why should they care about our laws?