[HN Gopher] Twitter takes down tweets criticising handling of pa...
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       Twitter takes down tweets criticising handling of pandemic at
       government request
        
       Author : danso
       Score  : 80 points
       Date   : 2021-04-24 16:22 UTC (6 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.medianama.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.medianama.com)
        
       | gremlinsinc wrote:
       | I get censoring calls for violence and insurgency...
       | 
       | Like at the capitol... Though to be honest idiots at the capitol
       | were stupid many posting their crimes and social media leading to
       | their arrest.
       | 
       | Social media needs decentralized with community based censoring
       | let govts police their citizens if they want but leave the
       | content up with disclaimers and such.
       | 
       | I think it's more damaging for shady politicians, criminals, etc
       | if their tweets were permanent and there were no delete button...
       | 
       | You could add revisions/retractions but can't pretend it was
       | never said by erasing.
        
         | ab_testing wrote:
         | Sounds good in theory but in practice, if you want to operate
         | in a particular country,you need to abide by the laws of that
         | country. That is what Apple stores all Chinese iCloud data
         | within China and hands over the iCloud encryption keys to the
         | government .
         | 
         | Free speech is not that free in other parts of the world .
        
       | 0xmohit wrote:
       | Censorship in India isn't new. The usual modus operandi is to
       | shutdown the internet. 4G mobile services were banned in Kashmir
       | for 550 days [0]. The objective is largely to control the
       | dissemination of news.
       | 
       | The government had recently amended laws to govern social media
       | giants including Facebook, WhatsApp and Twitter [1]. These laws
       | were introduced during the protests against the farm laws when
       | government had requested Twitter to take down a number of
       | accounts:
       | 
       | > The new rules come on the heels of a tense standoff between
       | Twitter and the Indian government. Twitter reinstated several
       | accounts that the government had ordered it to take down for
       | using what it called "incendiary and baseless" hashtags related
       | to farmers protesting against new agricultural reforms. The
       | platform ultimately took down hundreds of accounts and partially
       | restricted others, but drew a line by refusing to block accounts
       | of journalists, activists and politicians.
       | 
       | The public policy directory at Facebook had opposed applying the
       | company's hate-speech rules to a politician from Prime Minister
       | Narendra Modi's party who had in posts called Muslims traitors
       | [2].
       | 
       | > The WSJ article said Das had told staff that applying hate-
       | speech rules to politicians close to Modi's ruling Bharatiya
       | Janata Party (BJP) "would damage the company's business prospects
       | in the country."
       | 
       | [0] https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory/india-
       | restores-4...
       | 
       | [1] https://edition.cnn.com/2021/02/25/tech/india-twitter-
       | facebo...
       | 
       | [2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-india-
       | exclusive-...
        
         | PicassoCTs wrote:
         | Its high time, a slow, authoritarian resistant, mesh net
         | infrastructure standard is developed, were travelling people
         | become the data carriers for requests from cut off regions.
         | Nobody knows what s/he carries, and it can only be decrypted by
         | the receiver.
         | 
         | Routing could be done by likelihood of organization
         | association. Organizations are cellphone-proximity structures,
         | formed by popular vote of each member validated with its
         | history.
         | 
         | If you claim to regularly fly to hongkong, somebody on a
         | busstation might transfer to your phone via BT a encrypted
         | documentation, all even with plausible deniability, if part of
         | the meshnet is a friendly virus. If your behaviour does not
         | correspond to your actual behaviour, it gets written as a sink
         | into a public ledger.
         | 
         | Imagine the data-organism taking shape in such a mesh-net.
         | Classes in a university are constituted by the lecturer joining
         | the class, the ever changing setup in a bus is constituted by
         | the bus-driver.
         | 
         | Its like providing a reliable behaviour prediction, makes you a
         | reliable routing predictor for the data hoping from phone to
         | phone. I predict three hops to the train-station, near a
         | household router, which is regularly in contact with X.
        
       | afuchs wrote:
       | See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26926054 and
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26925698
        
       | vmception wrote:
       | if you get in bed with a government then maintaining a
       | relationship with that government is more important than worrying
       | about their form of due process
       | 
       | unless another part of the government tries to say you can't take
       | all the business, of course
        
       | RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
       | For everyone talking about the Streisand Effect, I don't think it
       | is applicable anymore in the age of centralized social media such
       | as Twitter and Facebook.
       | 
       | Can anyone point to an information or post that was censored by
       | Twitter and/or Facebook and really took off in a huge way?
       | 
       | I think censorship these days is pretty effective, if you can get
       | Twitter and Facebook on board.
        
       | abnry wrote:
       | It isn't surprising but this is getting to be the last straw.
       | Twitter is poison.
        
         | Sunspark wrote:
         | I think it's great. Twitter allows people to communicate
         | relatively openly. The alternative is to have all
         | communications run through a censor filter.
        
           | makeworld wrote:
           | The alternative is decentralization. You don't have to prefer
           | one master over another.
        
           | failwhaleshark wrote:
           | Lol, I hope that's /s. Unless you're in India or somewhere
           | where Twitter bows down to censorship.
        
       | tgflynn wrote:
       | Significant clarifying detail: At the request of the Indian
       | government and in India.
        
       | bnc319 wrote:
       | It's interesting to see them fully removed, rather than adding a
       | disclaimer. I predict that the disclaimers that sites like
       | YouTube have implemented in an effort to fight misinformation are
       | not that effective, especially among users who already have a
       | tendency to distrust platforms/government.
        
       | villgax wrote:
       | Way to go Indian Govt! Now you get to see the Streisand effect in
       | all of its glory as you try to burn bodies & still hold political
       | rallies.
        
       | worldofmatthew wrote:
       | This will come to other countries with most of the west calling
       | for censorship of the internet.
        
         | lawnchair_larry wrote:
         | Yep, and they already do it voluntarily in the US.
        
       | encryptluks2 wrote:
       | In other news, Twitter takes down tweets criticizing their
       | handling of taking tweets down at the request of their PR team.
       | /sarcasm.
       | 
       | Welcome to 1984.
        
         | karmakaze wrote:
         | > /sarcasm
         | 
         | How would you know? I suppose encoded/improperly spelled
         | messages would get through some of the time.
        
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       (page generated 2021-04-24 23:02 UTC)