Twitter takes down tweets criticising handling of pandemic at government request

https://www.medianama.com/2021/04/223-twitter-mp-minister-censor/

by danso • 5 years ago

196 45 5 years ago

bnc319• 5 years ago

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.

abnry• 5 years ago

It isn't surprising but this is getting to be the last straw. Twitter is poison.

Sunspark• 5 years ago

I think it's great. Twitter allows people to communicate relatively openly. The alternative is to have all communications run through a censor filter.

failwhaleshark• 5 years ago

Lol, I hope that's /s. Unless you're in India or somewhere where Twitter bows down to censorship.

makeworld• 5 years ago

The alternative is decentralization. You don't have to prefer one master over another.

tgflynn• 5 years ago

Significant clarifying detail: At the request of the Indian government and in India.

villgax2• 5 years ago

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.

fatboy93• 5 years ago

Not really, this will be swept under the rug by creating a new BS completely unrelated to the current issue at hand.

And people will forget this in a week.

worldofmatthew• 5 years ago

This will come to other countries with most of the west calling for censorship of the internet.

lawnchair_larry• 5 years ago

Yep, and they already do it voluntarily in the US.

encryptluks2• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

/sarcasm

How would you know? I suppose encoded/improperly spelled messages would get through some of the time.

gremlinsinc3• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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 .

gremlinsinc3• 5 years ago

My point is if it is truly decentralized... As in blockchain or distributed db... Without transaction fees of course...

And it's immutable. As in nothing can be deleted. Admins and authorities could probably block display because that's delivered via api, but all messages remain on blockchain or whatever permanently.

Addendums could be allowed maybe... From site admins for just that site, DAO team for a sub data item that's linked and always shows with it, or the user themselves could add a retraction, correction, etc... Say under penalty of torture...

But the original message and every revision/addendum is public record...

Any site pulling from the fire hose can decide which parts of the api to display or they could filter blocked items individually...

If there's something really bad like media links to child porn those could be flagged so sites could perma block them....

But all the data is decentralized and ran by a DAO, with a purposes of ensuring transparency in social media.

afuchs• 5 years ago

vmception• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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.

0xmohit• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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.

2Gkashmiri• 5 years ago

https://apnews.com/article/366a717b2c1b9a677fcbd533e9b225c2

Read this. These guys had to actually smuggle their photos out of the area because the oppressive government would not have let them otherwise. These powerful photos are a reminder to what a nation state can do to suppress dissent but as you can see, defiance is on an another level

walrus01• 5 years ago

The Indian government has proven time and again that it is no friend of an open and uncensored internet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_India

rbut• 5 years ago

Twitter has proven time and again that it is no friend of an open and uncensored platform.

saimiam• 5 years ago

Any company is expected to operate under the laws of the land it does business in. Twitter is not the culprit here.

Black101• 5 years ago

Good job Twitter... get down to their level.

satya71• 5 years ago

Notably, none of the tweets taken down are by members of the ruling party. They have been promoting misinformation and quackery.

zeb883• 5 years ago

Nothing new in the "new India". People of India sort of deserve what's happening to them, for they voted for a fascist.

nothinggoesaway• 5 years ago

Careful where this "sort of deserve" talk goes.

(Germans voted for the Nazis. [1])

[1] https://www.dw.com/en/fact-or-fiction-adolf-hitler-won-an-el...

zeb883• 5 years ago

Not applicable in this case. Modi did win and that too by a thumping majority over the Hindutva doctrine.

higerordermap2• 5 years ago

Ah. A political party can always win by misleading people. Does that mean misled people "deserve" everything that happens to them?

Not to mention that choice was between two equally corrupt parties each with their own flaws. But people could've seen what Modi has done after first 5 years period.

zeb883• 5 years ago

Nah...you forgetting that Modi was a genocidal figure banned by US for entry when he became the PM.

There is no comparison between Mr Singh a world renowned economist and RSS stooge Modi, and people choose their fate because of Muslim hate.

dang• 5 years ago

We've banned you for this. You can't do that here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

ageek123• 5 years ago

It's amusing that in the US, the people who are most upset about this are largely the same people who argue most strenuously for Twitter to do more censorship.

V-eHGsd_• 5 years ago

This isn’t reddit, expand on this point.

fighterpilot• 5 years ago

I'm guessing: The people who supported censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story are probably also against this particular instance of censorship.

random314• 5 years ago

If someone supports censorship of fake news, it does not automatically imply that they also support the censorship of facts.

villgax2• 5 years ago

Like why is it even the governments business to go curate a public image. If there is a false statement, make a statement about it don't infringe on rights of your citizens or non-citizens.

It's the fundamental difference between an Authoritative govt & a democratically elected one.

I hope after the whole pandemic goes away (whenever that is), these issues of suppression are thoroughly investigated to find out who is behind muffling voices/criticism.

AzzieElbab• 5 years ago

The real scandal is US not exporting enough vaccines and vaccines materials while sitting on stockpiles sufficient to meet domestic demand many times over. Everything else is just noise

tibbydudeza• 5 years ago

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/04/why-the-us-still-can...

It is not the US govt fault that the Indian govt is incompetent.

fallingfrog• 5 years ago

Suggest headline edit to say: “..at India government request”

Twitter takes down tweets criticising handling of pandemic at government request

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