This article notes a couple of interesting things about the new Twitter policy:
– Tweets that get censored by requesting country X will only be censored in country X … the rest of the world will still be able to see them.
– The censorship will be on a tweet-by-tweet basis, after a request by law enforcement for the specific tweet is presented and evaluated.
– Twitter will inform the tweeter of the take-down.
– Twitter will be reporting all take-downs at the Chilling Effects website.
– Twitter won't censor (or automatically censor?) Re-Tweets,@Replies, or Quoted tweets. So in theory, even if tweet A gets pulled down, someone could have quoted or re-tweeted it already and it would still be visible (unless, presumably, a second request comes from the government).
– Though a government may ask for an entire account to be blocked within their country, that person can still access their account and tweet from it, even if nobody in their country can see it.
– Twitter will put the tweets back up if someone successfully challenges the take-down in court. Which doesn't seem too likely, given most of the countries liable ask for take-downs.
All of which puts a lot of holes in that censorship regime.
It's not clear, also, whether the policy allows takedown requests from country X to pull down tweets issued by someone outside of country X. If I say, "The Armenian genocide never happened," can France ask Twitter to take down that tweet? Presumably, since I'm not a French citizen, and not on French soil, I'm not subject to French law on the matter and there would be no legal basis for it. Maybe.
At any rate, as the article concludes:
_'This may be why — for all the reflexive hysteria online to the change — some online activists are actually praising Twitter for being much more transparent and frankly progressive when it comes to corporate user responsibility. As sociology professor Zeynep Tufekci wrote in a tweet: “It’s weird for me to defend a company so hard but If I were a govt I’d see [Twitter’s] policy as the middle finger.”'
Interesting. #ddtb
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Twitter ‘Censoring’ Doesn’t Apply To Re-Tweets | TPM Idea Lab
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