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At what point does Twitter restricting world leader tweets become election interference and foreign policy interference. Will Twitter have to register as a fore
by RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago
At what point does Twitter restricting world leader tweets become election interference and foreign policy interference. Will Twitter have to register as a foreign agent in Europe?
- metalliqaz 7y agoLet's be real here. This is aimed squarely at Trump.
- whateveracct 7y agoHe is the highest-profile rule breaker, both on Twitter and in the US govt :)
- polynomial 7y agoRule-breaker-in-chief
- djsumdog 7y agoSo does that mean he's "Disruptive?" He's the Uber of politics? The Ubermensch?
- busterarm 7y agoBecause no punishment designed for one person or group has ever been used more broadly to suppress others... Okay.
- trentnix 7y ago...and it will fall on lots of others. For the children!
- ceejayoz 7y agoIt's aimed squarely at narrowing the exemption in the rules they carved out specifically for Trump in the first place.
- dgzl 7y agoThe easiest way to find the line is to cross it.
- journalctl 7y agoI don’t think that was ever in question.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- meerita 7y agoNot surprising after the leaders of Twitter admitted they're on they are left leaning.
- DonHopkins 7y agoBeing anti-Trump doesn't mean you're left leaning. There are many right leaning people who are extremely anti-Trump. Do you think Bill Kristol is "left leaning"?
- meerita 7y agoYes, but the leaders admitted they're left leaning, therefore, anything anti-trump, conservative or something that is remotely center-right is subject of bans. They banned so many people at this stage I don't need to do examples.
- toomuchtodo 7y agoWould you argue the same if Twitter simply deplatformed political leaders? It is their platform.
- dev_dull 7y agoThat would be a silly thing for them to do because it would invite burdensome regulation, such as what the FTC imposed on radio station operators.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- notJim 7y agoThe tension is that although it is indeed their platform, the function it plays in society is similar to a public broadcast channel. IMO, a good analogy is the broadcast radio spectrum. Imagine if one or two companies had sole ownership over all of the broadcast radio spectrum, and could decide at their sole discretion who gets to publish. It would be insane, yet with Twitter and Facebook, this is the situation we're in. IMO this tension is fundamentally what drives so much of the controversy around social media.
- dgzl 7y agoThis analogy clearly doesn't hold up. It's more like a very successful private broadcast channel, but where making an effective public broadcast channel is too difficult for the government, so we pretend that the private channel is "like a public channel". No company owns all the internet, thus using the analogy that a few companies own the entire radio spectrum doesn't make sense.
- CharlesColeman 7y ago>> The tension is that although it is indeed their platform, the function it plays in society is similar to a public broadcast channel. IMO, a good analogy is the broadcast radio spectrum. > This analogy clearly doesn't hold up. It's more like a very successful private broadcast channel, but where making an effective public broadcast channel is too difficult for the government, so we pretend that the private channel is "like a public channel". I think the analogy does hold up. Society limits private property rights all the time for the public good, and that's a good thing. For instance my private property has drainage and utility easements that allow others to use to for the public good. I don't even own all the property in the area. Theoretically I could go all "muh private property" and demand the government spend a bunch of money to divert water around my land and remove the easement, but that would be silly and wasteful. Right not we're in a situation where a too few companies control too much of the internet mass media landscape. If that's not remedied with something like antitrust breakups, some kind of "social media access easement" legal framework may be worth looking at.
- root_axis 7y agoNever. World leaders don't have to use twitter, they could host their own platform or use one of the other platforms. Twitter should not be obligated to host anyone's content. It doesn't matter how popular twitter is, it's just a website.
- tannhauser23 7y agoPretty sure if Twitter decided to allow one candidate to post on its platform but denied another one access, there would be a strong case that Twitter is making an in-kind campaign contribution to the first candidate.
- mehrdadn 7y agoThe service is provided to every candidate at the same price as is it to the rest of the planet... how is that a campaign contribution?
- PeterisP 7y agoIf a free platform of mass media is not provided to every candidate but is provided to some candidates while others are banned, then that's effectively advertising for some candidates.
- mehrdadn 7y agoIf it wasn't free (say $0.01 per tweet or whatever) would that be different?
- PeterisP 7y agoNo, they'd still have to offer it at that price (the same price) to all candidates equally - that's basically a way to avoid having to decide whether the offered price is fair or artificial; you can assert that an hour of ads for your cable network costs $0.01, but that's the amount you'll get not only for your favored candidate but also for the same ads for his opponent.
- bertil 7y agoGood question, but no more than a local newspaper owned by an Australian: the company has a local subsidiary which is legally responsible. There’s been instances where (Uber IIRC) country managers were jailed (for a day). In general, legislation in Europe on elections is quite strict so it’s unlikely American more free approach to speech will be so strict it’s seen as an interference. For instance, a politician in France has been fined €15k for saying racist things once. With that, you have fewer “Mexico… they are rapists…” to deal with. Politics in Hungary, Poland, Italy might make that less true soon. Outside of Europe, that’s more common and social media company routinely get into trouble for either censoring or permitting lèse-Majesté, Nobel-prize laureate defending ethnic cleansing, apostasy or defending lynching apostates. It’s a large part of local managers’ role to dance with absurd debates.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- jakelazaroff 7y agoNever? Is Breitbart “election interference” because they post biased coverage in favor of conservatives? Or ActBlue, because they only fundraise for left-leaning politicians and causes?
- Meekro 7y agoI've had people telling me for the last 3 years that it's definitely election interference if a private Russian company pays some people to write tweets about US politicians. But now, apparently it's not election interference if Twitter itself applies special restrictions to the accounts of foreign politicians it doesn't like?
- atomi 7y agoOne is a private American company abiding the law and exercising it's legal right. The other is a rogue state sponsored disinformation/psyop campaign detrimental to our sovereignty. How is this that difficult?
- akhilcacharya 7y agoIt’s remarkable that the two can even be conflated! I fear sometimes that a considerable amount of Americans have no further loyalty to the ideals of this country.
- weberc2 7y agoIt’s not a conflation; the point is that if Twitter _as a communication channel_ holds so much away that Russians can upvote or retweet things to manipulate our democracy, the _how in the world_ are we okay with a private company having the ability to directly and unaccountably manipulate that channel?
- abathur 7y agoI roughly agree that we should require vastly more transparency than we do for all large-platform decisions (traffic/ad/metadata/data-sharing agreements between any number of firms, developer accounts, payment/donation platform accounts, social media accounts, etc.) that can have a really big effect on normal people relative to the platforms implementing them. But this is still conflation. 1. Unless/until communication is excluded from what can legally be a business, Twitter has a legitimate commercial interest (and probably a legal obligation) to moderate the platform it built to ensure its the company isn't significantly harmed by the behavior of users who are not paying customers. I doubt anyone can do this with integrity over time when money and power are involved, but unless you're advocating for nationalizing social media platforms or creating some sort of Department of Public Speech to provide "neutral" voter-accountable moderators at no cost, I don't see how you can argue that the organization running a platform doesn't have a legitimate interest in shaping what it is for. No other separate entity--not the IRA nor Facebook nor HuffPo nor Exxon nor Fox news nor the DNC/RNC nor the IRA--have any legitimate right to shape the purpose of Twitter's platform. I guess the IRA can try to turn Twitter into whatever it wants--but Twitter is completely within its rights to shift policy to address how any entity that doesn't hold a controlling stake uses its platform at scale. Regardless of how Twitter does or does not exercise this right, there will be genuine and malign actors attempting to portray them as only doing X for illegitimate political reasons (to stir up support, circle the wagons, or bully them into doing more or less of X). 2. The mechanisms are very different. If the IRA manipulated democracies by banning people from a platform they built--or if Twitter ran a massive astroturfing operation intended to synthesize the appearance of social consensus on someone else's social media platform--we'd be talking apples-and-apples. ----- I want to be a little more cautious moving ahead since I'm assuming more here, but outside of and separate from this conflation issue, it seems you're building an argument like: 1. anyone who thinks unchecked state social-media influence operations merit action by a private company with the ability to directly and unaccountably manipulate the channel should instead want to nationalize or close social media to protect everyone from the owners of the platform 2. anyone who doesn't think unchecked state-sponsored social media influence campaigns are big enough of a deal to justify nationalizing or closing social media platforms is being disgenuine (either by over-weighting the influence campaigns, or under-rating the possibility that the platforms owners engage in similar behavior.) But the opinions aren't mutually exclusive. Someone can think prosecutors have too much power, and advocate for them to use the power they have more-justly. Someone can think platforms are too big to be opaquely-ruled fiefdoms and advocate for long-term solutions while advocating for harm-reduction in the short term.
- IfOnlyYouKnew 7y agoAt the point where changing election outcomes is a motivating factor for Twitter's decisions. Contrary to popular opinion, motives matter.
- 4ntonius8lock 7y agoAfter this, if I lived in any non-US country I'd be wanting for them to register or face as much wrath as that country can impose on twitter. The EU should be able to make them feel some pain hopefully. Twitter's rules are open ended with tons of room for judgement calls. So now an anonymous, under payed SV employee (or soon an underpaid Indian) will be making decisions that affect the politics of a country? What if the employee making the decision against, say, the leaders of Palestine, is an Israeli? Or the other way around? Surely we can't consider those two impartial to each other. Will we ever know such a situation even happened? With no public registry of these actions? Their promise to 'maybe' put out a formal announcements when a leader is shadow banned, is that really a promise or will they later reference the fact that they said 'may'? There's no formal system of recourse? No local representation? And all based on a US system of values? Seems very sketchy and to me it reeks of fascism. Literally the opposite of democracy and open information. Doesn't matter if you hate the right or the left. Open and free societies benefit everyone. This is a big step in the other direction.
- Pxtl 7y agoConsider that they're already bending their TOS for important world leaders. If a world leader says something bigoted that would get you or I banned, they won't. So it makes sense to soft-ban them.
- krige 7y agoIt doesn't even have to be a "world leader", TOS enforcement seems to be stronly partisan (or worse, completely random) and only really big outcries change that.
- jonathanstrange 7y agoRegistering as a foreign agent exists in Russia, but I didn't know it existed in other parts of Europe. I'm not in any way insinuating you're wrong, merely curious about the facts. What other regulations besides the Russian one do you have in mind?
- lixtra 7y agoIt also exists in the US[0] and is applied[1]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Agents_Registration_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Agents_Registration_Ac... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Butina https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Butina
- giancarlostoro 7y ago> Will Twitter have to register as a foreign agent in Europe? I hope that wont matter. This is outright political censorship. Today its the ToS you agree with that they enforce. Tomorrow its the one you disagree with. This is outright political censorship and it is dangerous. They should now be considered an editor and totally liable for the content on their editorialized website.
- dragonwriter 7y agoTwitter not applying the same rules to arbitrarily defined leaders as it applies generally is election interference (or in-kind campaign contribution); and the half-measure at best of restricting third-party retweets for actions that it would, for any other actor, ban the account holder doesn't fundamentally change that.