The Internet Becomes Less All-or-Nothing

I remain of mixed feelings on Twitter's recent change to better allow selective by-country censorship / take-downs of specific tweets.

On the plus side, it means that Twitter can operate more freely in countries that might otherwise have banned the whole service outright. There's a lot of positive good that Twitter can serve, even if one can't / can't talk about certain things on it in certain places (at least not without being a bit more circumspect).

That's it for the plus side.

On the down side, it does allow (and thus encourage) each country to impose its own fine tweaks of censorship. Turkey disallows any discussion of the Armenian genocide. France disallows any denial of the Armenian genocide. It's wacky, but now it's much easier.

And if Twitter has done it, all other similar services will be under the onus of the local governments to do the same.

Finally, it continues to break down the idea of the Internet as a unified global conversation. That's never been completely true, but it's growing less and less so. Once upon a time, if some country didn't like some tweets, its only option was either to ban the service from their country (which was crude and difficult to do until they built their infrastructure to chokepoint all internal traffic), or they had to convince the country in question to take down such tweets for everyone, which was a relatively high bar. Arguably, it's better that everyone in the world can discuss the Armenian genocide except Turkey, than that Turkey can try to black out that world conversation — but it's also then easier for Turkey to so restrict its own people (et al.) without drawing down the world's ire.

An imperfect solution, at any rate — but it's an imperfect world, sadly. #ddtb

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