EU, Canada, China, Turkey or North Korea - if you want to do business there you have to respect their laws.
“For profit US corporation fighting foreign government atrocities” is a deeply flawed idea.
If Indians believe that they need wider free speech rights or other protections, they need to change their political figures and laws accordingly. It’s unreasonable to expect that a foreign corporation will do that for them, it even might be the case that they(the locals) don’t want it.
Imagine the other way around, Italian company selling Kinder Surprise Eggs in US, Swiss company doing banking by the Swiss laws in US, Malta company running gambling in the US by the Maltese laws. Would they be considered fighting the unreasonable food regulations, toppling the oppressive financial laws or pushing against tyrannical gambling laws of the US? I don’t think so.
I think that's a bit of an unfair phrasing. How about "Good people upholding their morals instead of dropping them at the door when they go to work"
I really am not a fan of how far we've taken the general image that 'business is business' and a bunch of regular morals are OK to toss out. We should preserve the social stigma we hold against people equally against companies.
So far, as we see with Apple, Twitter, FB, Palantir, Oracle, Cisco and many others, the Americans are fine with their businesses working with those governments.
I'm not siding one way or another, but it's not clear that taking down the platform as a whole is always a better solution than running a slightly censored one.
Who gets to define the "Good people"? We've seen time and again that the social media platforms are far from altruistic and in fact enable movements like Trump '16 and Brexit. I agree with your general point though, we should hold companies accountable to the same rigor that we have for govts and individuals.
What ethics are you talking about?
The ones where they silenced "Far-Right" Sceptics of Corona-Measures in Europe? A rapper responding with "ok, dude" to a trans person? HK Virologist Li Meng-Yan? The government of Hungary?
Or where they permanently ban conservative cartoonists, the MyPillow guy, Project Veritas – but not the Ayatollah?
AFAIC there's nothing special here to see. Standard Twitter Behaviour.
Also OP's critique is misguided, as there is no specific Indian law Twitter would have broken (according to the article) if it hadn't complied with the government's request. Likewise, there was no law forcing twitter to permanently ban the accounts I've mentioned.
Twitter is just a typical SV org, laden with upper-class virtue-signalers, who couldn't even notice their own bigotry if the stench of human-feces covered San Francisco actually made it into their comfy homes.
Indian Twitter users and Indian civil society should have just the same expectation of receiving support from Twitter's lawyers as U.S users and U.S citizens get. That's what it means to be a global corporation.
>If Indians believe that they need wider free speech rights or other protections, they need to change their political figures and laws accordingly.
Yes, but that is a process. And part of that process is making a fuss about cases like this. You act as if an order issued by some bureaucrat was itself the law and the will of the poeple. That's completely ridiculous. We would never accept that in a rich western country before it has gone through the courts of law and the court of public opinion.
In my view it is outright racist to expect corporations to put up a public legal fight against questionable decisions by authorities in rich countries but consider the same thing a cultural inevitability in poor countries.
I mean, we kind of do act that way. If a given thing has regulations then there almost certainly exists a small office whose sole purpose is to be the button pushers for those regulations, and their word is effectively law unless you're wealthy enough to fight it.
As a comparatively minor example, there's just some guy behind a desk in the MN department of public safety who can unilaterally revoke drivers' licenses without any court's approval or any available appeal's process. The police and the rest of the system are more than happy to enforce that guy's decisions.
*In case there's any ambiguity, the "wealth" mentioned above doesn't just refer to your legal fees, but also to things like being able to afford to repeatedly take a day off work to wait on hold or in a line for yet another round of red tape. It adds up, especially with more than half of people living paycheck to paycheck.
they do you just misinterpreted what the fundamental values were
In the end, Swiss companies doing Swiss style secret banking in Switzerland were deemed unacceptable to the US and forced to change. It's realpolitik all the way down.
This stuff tends to come down to whether you support the specific policy and outcomes.
Hyped up nationalism is a problem in lots of countries; there's only so much blame you can apply to social media before having to look at other actors as well.
Larry and Sergei were of the opinion that any information, even if censored, is better than no information at all.
> "While removing search results is inconsistent with Google's mission, providing no information (or a heavily degraded user experience that amounts to no information) is more inconsistent with our mission." [1]
They could have pulled out but they were idealistic and felt that their presence was one step towards making the world a better place. Well, that and
> The Google statement said the tradeoff for going against its basic principle of making the "world's information universally available and accessible" is gaining greater access to a quickly growing Chinese economy.
That's the general gist anyway. I forget the specifics but it's covered in a book called In The Plex[2]
[1]: http://edition.cnn.com/2006/BUSINESS/01/25/google.china/ [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Plex
We just can't expect the foreign country to change their laws or the company to break those laws.
Maybe Google backed down because damage on the brand in US would be greater than the expected profits from China? Maybe they back down because employees went political and Google didn't want to lose them?
Or maybe they are simply afraid that these new abilities will come back home?
That's a wonderful idea. Pity it's censored in India.
TIL that Kinder Surprise Eggs are illegal in the US.
Twitter wouldn't have been breaking any laws if precedent weren't being set by this government.
1. 1975-77: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emergency_(India)
2. 2011: https://www.telegraphindia.com/7-days/when-net-is-gross/cid/...
3. 2008: https://www.theregister.com/2008/05/19/google_india_gandhi/
No Indian politician or government _likes_ criticism. Modi is almost unique in the staggering amount of abuse and vitriol that has been directed towards him over the last twenty years. If it had been any one else, they would probably have lost it by now.
IMHO, if that's the case Indians need to get a new government and fight their own wars. Why would Twitter be liberating the Indian people? If anything, that "liberation" would come at a cost just as with the USSR liberating Germany from the Nazis, US liberating Iraqi people from Saddam, Turkey liberating Turkish Cypriots from the Greek dictatorship.
It's obvious with physical goods. If the goods aren't inline with the country's laws then you can't sell them there. Simple. It's a lot less obvious with digital services. If I run an online service that's a legal entity in the US, with servers in the US, and someone accesses from a different country, whose laws count more? Should I have to write my code to obey every country's specific legal frameworks? What if two countries conflict? Does it make a difference if there are edge servers in the foreign state that do caching? This is not a simple problem.
“For profit US corporation fighting foreign government atrocities” is a deeply flawed idea.
"For profit US corporation doing what the shareholders want" isn't though, and if the shareholders think that being complicit in covering up atrocities reduces their stock value then the corporation has to fight the foreign government instead. That's how capitalism works.
Did IBM do wrong it were they just operating in a market with different laws?
How do you decide which violations of human rights are just different laws and which are crimes against humanity?
And then twitter in India won't ban people just like it does in the US. Oh wait...
Obviously India is requiring no such thing, but what about when China wants google to build them a censored search engine?
Equating posting anything online to child murder as an acceptable act undoes any sort of point you could be legitimately making.
I don't buy moral relativism, it may be legal in China to put the Uyghurs in camps but any company helping to enable that is on the wrong side of history - legality is irrelevant.
Stuff above that threshold (kinder eggs) sure, follow the country's policies - provided the country is a real democracy, with a free press, and rule of law.
at some point you need to draw a line where "profit is the only thing that matters" ends and some basic humanity should prevail
Your admirable concern for human rights is possible to express in a way that doesn't contribute to destroying the community.
Making this worse are the new Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021 (the “Intermediary Rules”)[3]. Among the many issues, they increase obligations on large social media platforms (above 5e5 users), enforce government takedowns within 36 hours, enable mandatory social media verification, enforce algorithmic (AI-driven) censorship and change intermediary liability to criminal. IFF has gotten one victory against these in court[2], but there's a long way to go.
[0]: https://www.wsj.com/articles/india-threatens-twitter-with-pe...
[1]: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/pranavdixit/india-threa...
[a]: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/01/twitter-restricts-over-a-d...
[b]: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/03/india-sends-warning-to-twi...
[3]: https://internetfreedom.in/intermediaries-rules-2021/
[2]: https://internetfreedom.in/kerala-hc-grants-a-stay-of-the-op...
India banned TikTok last year after the app was determined to be "prejudicial to sovereignty and integrity of India, defence of India, security of state and public order". Twitter doesn't want to be next.
The way TikTok manipulates its feed to serve the CCP's interests and influence public sentiment in the country is a threat. Things like downplaying the CCP's invasion of HK.
https://stratechery.com/2020/the-tiktok-war/
That's basically the opposite of what's happening here. TikTok's threat is foreign government manipulation of the public and the block is blocking that government manipulation.
Here if Twitter got blocked it'd be because they refused to implement the government manipulation - it's a difference in kind.
At least people outside can see that information, not ideal though. If we had more platforms and less concentration it would be harder to build these walls.
On the other hand, my understanding is that Twitter did self-report these actions to Harvard, so they should be given some credit.
This is a disappointing outcome of our community (software engineers, hackers, builders) and our technology - the web as we've built it.
The promise of decentralized communications empowering people.
We should expect more, those in a position to do the right thing at Twitter should try to do so. I hope long term something like urbit wins out and actually empowers its users.
What's the point of being a free western country if the people that need the support most are the most ignored?
The more powerful is the government, the quicker it is at slapping your hand, and the more efficient it is at it.
If you operate in a country, you normally can't avoid the limitations of the country's laws, no matter how nonsensical you might find these laws. Technology does not change this equation materially, given strong enough law enforcement.
Unfortunately enlightenment / classically liberal values (different from leftist liberal values) have been on the decline in the US, particularly with younger generations. Free speech is one of those values under attack. Even the ACLU, under different leadership than in the past, is wavering on free speech (https://reason.com/2018/06/21/aclu-leaked-memo-free-speech/). James Kirchick spoke at length about this unfortunate evolution in a recent podcast (https://quillette.com/2021/04/09/podcast-144-james-kirchick-...).
The West (as nations, corporations, citizens, etc) is not in a position to proselytize on this front any longer. Although the US government is bound by the first amendment, we have effectively outsourced our right to free speech over to private monopolies that aggressively censor views that don’t fit progressive perspectives. Biden even recently said that no constitutional amendment is absolute, which seems like further normalization of erosion of fundamental rights.
With the floodgate of censorship already being opened in the West, it seems there is no one on the side of unfettered speech and intellectual freedom today. At the same time I understand why other nations are wary of both the power vested in social media and the influence of savvy or highly active participants therein. It’s a risk for local culture, politics, and stability to be undermined through that channel. Even European nations are increasingly skeptical of outside influences corrupting their sovereignty (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/09/world/europe/france-threa...).
All they do is dump waste amounts of shit on the plates of decision makers and then crucify them for problems no one can solve or have capacities to solve only badly.
People think this is a great way to take out buffons like Modi or Trump. But the truth is such systems will take out anyone propped up especially dealing with complex problems.
If people continue to believe that public posts on Twitter and Facebook accurately reflect reality, and it's possible for governments to silently (or not silently!) censor those platforms, then social media becomes an incredibly effective tool for propaganda.
My personal solution is not to use any public social medium (places where I consume posts from anonymous strangers) except HN. Unfortunately that solution can't scale.
> “It’s a complete massacre of data,” said Bhramar Mukherjee, an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan who has been following India closely. “From all the modeling we’ve done, we believe the true number of deaths is two to five times what is being reported.” [0]
A related comment [1] on censorship in India.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/24/world/asia/india-coronavi...
To say that reality is wrong when the reality doesn't match somebody's model is peak absurdity
https://twitter.com/ARUNSHARMAJI/status/1385439504136237067
Under Articles 19(1) and 19(2) of the Indian Constitution, an individual's right to free speech is not absolute.[1] Further, Indian courts have often toed the line and held that maintenance of public order overrides any individual's right to free expression.
Political Twitter in India is primarily used by pro- and anti-Modi groups to abuse each other. Every photograph of a burning pyre and every apology from a media organization is another stick to beat the other with. Anti-Modi media might want to blame everything on the Kumbh and the elections, but this second wave has been noticeable since early/mid February and warnings were coming from states like Maharashtra, Punjab and Kerala. But the state and central governments didn't take these cases seriously till things got out of control. At one point, about 60+% of all new cases and deaths were coming from Maharashtra where there were no elections or Kumbh.
Personally speaking, this censorship is immaterial in the Indian context. If these tweets lead to rioting on the streets and a few people are murdered, that is just another day in India. The only thing I know for sure is that the people who will die are not the ones who tweet.
https://indianexpress.com/article/cities/delhi/ghaziabad-cre...
It would be good to have that attribution and that will require testing the deceased, but given the load on the system, everybody can extrapolate the scale and act accordingly.
https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid#excess-mor...
I don't think removing all ability for moderation is a good idea, more of a balance is necessary.
With well designed communication tools, you don't need moderators to decide what kind of content you see. You and your immediate network will be your own moderators by implicit action and inaction (and if everything is designed right, you can also take explicit action to e.g. drop that flat earth shit from your feed that shows up because your best friend keeps reading and upvoting it).
This is exactly how the real world works too. I choose who to chat and hang out with, I don't need to call cops to remove marketers and idiots from the world for me.
Anyone posting something outright illegal on a social platform is making themselves a target for law enforcement anyway — why subject the entire platform to censorship on their behalf?
Moderation is solved problem. There are email spam filters, network of trusted people, proof of work...
We’re talking text here btw, so CP/gore/revenge porn don’t count because those can’t be transmitted over text (links aside).
Whenever we are done with dealing with the pandemic who ever is responsible for giving these orders needs to be trialed.
This government originally asked everyone to impose self lockdowns before real lockdowns became necessary. Surely what an authoritarian government would do.
Significant portion of Indians already think there is big conspiracy behind Covid19 and everyone (Media, Governments, Healthcare professions, Big businesses, Pharma) is it to "$Insert your conspiracy here".
Now they see tweets being deleted just for being critical on government handling of issue. Doesn't that add fuel to conspiracy theories?
EDIT: Not all of reporters I mentioned were fringe. Two were from the Atlantic and Buzzfeed, and both claimed that the Coronavirus situation was overblown and that people saying otherwise were fear-mongering. Helping them out were a couple of epidemiologists who were also claiming that the coronavirus danger was overhyped. This was late January 2020.
Did Klaus Schwab say "The pandemic represents a rare but narrow window of opportunity to reflect, reimagine, and reset our world"? Did the WEF say "To build back better, we must reinvent capitalism"? Did Justin Trudeau say "this pandemic has provided an opportunity for a reset"? Did he repeat the words "build back better" and express support for such an effort? Did Biden and Harris say anything about that? Did Greta Thunberg? Did Cuomo? Did Pelosi? Did both Clintons? Elizabeth Warren? What about Johnson in the UK, did he ever express support for "building back better"? Jacinda Ardern?
The answer, of course, is that they all did, and far more rich influential bigwigs besides those. Do you suppose that they all simultaneously arrived at that wording independently?
Maybe you'd prefer it if we called it a "complex" theory? As in, the government wants more powers, the media wants endless crises to report on, the pharmaceutical companies want guaranteed income and protection from liability, leftists want to make sweeping changes to society and the economy according to their ideas about how the world really "ought" to work, etc.
The reality is that all these powerful people know each other, go to parties with one another, are a part of same organizations like Bilderberg or WEF, and share memos with what are they supposed to say to the public. It's not coincidental and saying that it is is pure gaslighting.
The situation on ground would vary from cities. Not every city is like Delhi. My small city(compared to other bigwigs in India) as of now has no issues. Health worker said Govt bed are 50% filled. I don't see people outside Govt or Pvt hospitals. But in Bangalore any huge spike(this is huge compared at last Oct peak) would be a very big concern.
Ps : the usual propaganda site or govt mouthpiece claims are bound to come out now. Read the article and make up your mind
Anybody with a VPN or is outside India can indeed read and make their mind up.
Edit: Every propaganda has an inkling of truth to it. That's why people believe it. And that's how everyone from Goebbels to the current Indian administration operate. Cherrypicking just the obviously fake ones to make your point is silly.
> OpIndia is an Indian right-wing news portal founded in 2014 by Rahul Raj and Kumar Kamal. The website has published fake news and anti-Muslim commentary on multiple occasions, including a 2020 incident in which it falsely claimed that a Hindu boy was sacrificed in a Bihar mosque.
> OpIndia is dedicated to criticism of what it considers "liberal media", and to support of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Hindutva ideology. According to University of Maryland researchers, OpIndia has shamed journalists it deems opposed to the BJP, and has alleged media bias against Hindus and the BJP. In 2019, the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) rejected OpIndia's application to be certified as a fact checker. IFCN-certified fact checkers identified 25 fake news stories and 14 misreported stories published by OpIndia from January 2018 to June 2020.
The submitted URL from the wire.in has screenshots of the more significant tweets that were hidden in India despite not violating Twitter policies regarding disinformation.
@dang fyi
Medianama, which covered this yesterday, chooses to _paraphrase_ the blocked tweets rather than quote them outright, likely in an attempt to avoid censorship demands. https://www.medianama.com/2021/04/223-twitter-mp-minister-ce...
1. A grown man, who was not running for president, was doing drugs.
2. He was hired by company to try and gain favor with the White House, which backfired when the White House decided to act against their interest anyways (in other words the guy running for vice president didn't give the company a sweetheart deal because his son was on the board).
Why do people try so hard to force this story?
The US government hasn't requested that social media companies do this, but the result is the same.
It should prove interesting.
https://www.legalreader.com/project-veritas-james-okeefe-sue...
Some of them were on the path of losing independence. The present government just accelerated the process since they were democratically elected twice in succession by stupendous majority.
So what’s left now for people to raise their voice are these private social media platforms. Ironically Twitter is perhaps the most independent channel in India now.
Social media platforms operate in that range, which is another similarity to drugs aside from calling their users “users”
So then this makes me question why there is so much outrage about this action. Those spinning up this outrage are likely ideologically opposed to the current ruling party in India, and are making an effort to undermine them politically. What has followed, like clockwork, is Western leftist news media and social media amplifying this messaging as much as possible. This is in keeping with the anti-India / Hinduphobic attacks we see regularly here in America in articles criticizing Modi or “news” segments run by outrage dealers like John Oliver.
As a related aside: it’s amazing to see all the American based news sites (Vox, TechCrunch, etc) run this story when they also regularly express support of tech companies practicing censorship per Silicon Valley political biases. Hell, a sitting US legislator (AOC) called for Parler to be kicked off the Apple and Google app stores (a violation of the first amendment), and many here on Hacker News cheered it on, under dubious claims that Trump incited violence even though Twitter’s own blog post on Trump’s permanent ban did not prove anything of the sort (https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspensio...). Clearly a double standard is being exercised between America and India.
To be clear I do not support censorship personally. I am for something closer to absolute free speech and letting people figure out what they want to trust and distrust, rather than ceding control to EITHER governments or massive multinational tech corporations. But the hypocrisy here is astounding. When I see manufactured stories like this, I can’t help but think back to what Macron and his government warned about when they discussed the danger of American social media and the “intellectual matrix” coming out of the US (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/09/world/europe/france-threa...).
But Western mainstream media doesn't like it when a third world govt tries to suppress fake narratives that could lead to unmanageable civic chaos.
Double standards I suppose.
https://twitter.com/MartinKulldorff/status/13716384856863580...
We did it before with Trump, and we used this exact reason.
Case closed.
Its a bit like China. When the concept "face" is being compromised, its vital to cover up the issue then to actually deal with the problem.
And dragging the British East India Company into every argument about India sheds more light into the inadequacy of us Indians to move past it. We're supposed to be healing ourselves by constructively criticizing our behavior towards others and ourselves...not by endlessly blaming the past for our current actions.
Disclaimer: I am Indian.
If the majority of Indian people want free speech, but their government does not honor that, then their democracy is dysfunctional and unrepresentative in that regard. A majority of Americans support stricter gun control, but our government does not honor that, so American democracy has its own dysfunctions.
“Earlier this month, in its annual report on global political rights and liberties, US-based non-profit Freedom House downgraded India from a free democracy to a "partially free democracy". Last week, Sweden-based V-Dem Institute was harsher in its latest report on democracy. It said India had become an "electoral autocracy". And last month, India, described as a "flawed democracy", slipped two places to 53rd position in the latest Democracy Index published by The Economist Intelligence Unit.”
Or have they succeeded in redefining it in school textbooks now?
