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The tweet might be disagreeable, but it is still an important statement from a foreign Government. Twitter has no right to be 'Ministry of Information'.
by iridium_core 6y ago
The tweet might be disagreeable, but it is still an important statement from a foreign Government. Twitter has no right to be 'Ministry of Information'.
- eightysixfour 6y agoDid you have a problem with Twitter banning ISIS propaganda pages and recruiters?
- mc32 6y agoDo you have a problem with Twitter banning foreign enemies?
- ceejayoz 6y agoI think that was precisely their point?
- mc32 6y agoI’m asking for a stance. I think in a democratic society we accept certain structures and laws. If the government declares a group an enemy of the state, then I think it’s fair to comply with that law. Making your own laws is not though. However, just the other day there was hooplah about GitHub not allowing access from Iran. So it’s like people want to eat their cake and also have it.
- alpaca128 6y agoTwitter doesn't make their own laws. They have a privately owned platform and can choose how to manage it to some degree. Just like a restaurant can kick you out if you don't act responsibly. It might be different if Twitter had a monopoly on social networks, but that's not the case.
- eightysixfour 6y agoI think this is actually a great point because it shows how much grey there is in something you're trying to make black and white. China is not declared a foreign enemy by law and yet the US government is actively using banning and sanctioning their otherwise legally operating companies. If they're not a foreign enemy, do they not have rights in the US? This whole thing is only shades of grey. Pretending it is black and white makes an honest conversation about it impossible.
- mc32 6y agoThe China situation is complicated by the unfair nature of commerce with them. They can ban Twitter. Google etc. Rip off IP and so on. So while not an enemy, they do engage in anticompetitive activities and we should counter them.
- eightysixfour 6y agoBut what if our companies are breaking Chinese law (like, not filtering searches), and that's why they've been banned?
- mc32 6y agoIt’s true and in that case unless it breaks US law, these companies should comply with local regulation. Now that becomes complicated when you deal with authoritarian regimes whose local laws may significantly violate international law (severe human rights violations, etc). But that’s only half the deal. The other are the one sided onerous and coercive terms applied to foreign/international companies. There are two main possibilities of why Google almost pulled out completely from China. One was safeguarding IP, the other is that at the time they cared a bit more about their ideals.
- leereeves 6y ago>> Do you have a problem with Twitter banning foreign enemies? > I think that was precisely their point? Is China our enemy?
- FentanylFloyd 6y agoterrorism, and recruiting for terrorists is against the law
- himinlomax 6y agoI have a problem with people who believe this propaganda had any net effect, except for railing up some people (which probably was the intent.)
- simlevesque 6y agoHow can you say that when there are hundreds of confirmed cases of ISIS radicalizing people from the internet ? Why do you have a problem believing that ?
- himinlomax 6y agoAre there? Was it through Twitter? In all likelihood what you're talking about is some random semi-private forum that's going to fly under the radar anyway. And you have that big, huge number: hundreds, not mere dozens, hundreds! My oh my, that's a scary army right there. How many suicide bombers have the harassment by ISrael of the illegally occupied territories population created? And with this joke of an army is good enough to kill free speech on the net. That's almost as tragically comical as the floatsam in the Gulf of Tonkin that caused millions of deaths, but it's happening right now.
- eightysixfour 6y agoYes, and yes. You can find numerous examples where Twitter in particular was the method of recruitment. Here is one: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/crime/northern-va-teen-admits-running-pro-islamic-state-twitter-and-helping-man-join-terrorist-group/2015/06/11/1d0cb33e-0eef-11e5-9726-49d6fa26a8c6_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/crime/northern-va-teen-...
- vladTheInhaler 6y agoLanguage is how we construct our shared reality. When you let language like this go unchallenged, it gives legitimacy to the worldview it endorses.
- 6y ago
- mech422 6y agoThey agreed to the TOS like everyone else... If people don't want 'big tech' to be 'Ministry of Information' stop using them as such? The Chinese government has plenty of channels they could use instead.
- leereeves 6y agoWhat channels could they use instead?
- loceng 6y agoSorry but this is a moot point. The real question to ask is do you think it's a good idea or fair to give equal access to Americans and those in nations with free speech, when we're not allowed or able to say what we want to the people of China?
- hungryhobo 6y agoyes, isn't that the whole point of free speech?
- loceng 6y agoIt's naive if you don't consider boundaries or borders of systems and consequences of if there isn't equal reciprocity between those boundaries - there's a power dynamic imbalance that will occur, e.g. it's not an equal playing field - and so it's fair to prevent them access to your population that allows free speech. It's their decision/action that is preventing their free speech, and if they change their action to allow free speech for their population then they'd be allowed equal access to Americans et al; at the moment foreign bad actors do in fact have easy access to populations with free speech - mostly attempting to craft, influencing international narratives or instigate hate to destabilize society/democracy.
- Mediterraneo10 6y agoThe Chinese government has its own foreign-language websites and even multiple foreign-language newspapers.
- nabla9 6y agoPrincipled response: Twitter should ban completely ban foreign governments who don't allow free speech for their citizens.
- eplanit 6y agoBut banning domestic users for their free speech is ok?
- YarickR2 6y agodefine "free speech". Or you arr using it in the USA sense ?
- Pfhreak 6y agoThat'd ban everyone. Is there a country that permits fully free speech? Certainly not the US. What about Germany? So now you are back in the position of making a judgement call about whose laws permit free enough speech. There's no black and white line to draw here.
- nabla9 6y agoThere is clearly visible line to be drawn. Difference in free speech between countries is not some linear continuum that gets gradually fuzzier when you get closer to Russia, Saudi Arabia and China. It varies a little, countries have idiosyncrasies, then there is big discontinuity.
- Pfhreak 6y agoYeah? In Denmark you can be fined for language that is insulting or degrading. Germany bans political parties. In Italy speech against the honor and prestige of the president is forbidden. South Korea strictly limits speech around elections. In Australia there is no constitutional protection of free speech and media (particularly depicting violence) is regularly censored. Now let's start going through the other countries and tell me how this isn't a spectrum. Where does Malaysia fall on your bright line? Turkey? The Philippines? Iran? Thailand? Belarus? Brazil? Egypt? Eritrea? I guarantee you that attempting to draw a bright line will absolutely run into fuzzy edges and judgement calls.
- alpaca128 6y agoThe problem is that there's no middleground. Either you don't play the "ministry of information" role and have to live with the fact that eventually your platform will turn into a more chaotic 4chan, or you start removing particularly excessive content at which point you crossed the only line that can be clearly defined. This is one of the reasons I think old-school forums are superior in terms of "web hygiene". You have a group of moderators, each responsible for a clearly defined section and a userbase small enough so rules are still enforceable. And the people running it are not an untouchable megacorporation.
- fvdessen 6y agoSince this tweet comes from the chinese embassy of the USA, it seems to me that this is diplomatic matters and should be handled by the government. For example the USA government could apply diplomatic sanctions to the embassy if they do not delete the tweet. I find it very strange that the twitter moderation team is acting in stead of the foreign affairs department.
- emptyparadise 6y agoIf we're going to treat Twitter like a public utility, let's just nationalize it and get rid of the oligopoly. Although I'd rather have it broken apart into a bunch of federated websites with a hard requirement to never break federation (GTalk/XMPP style) with the rest of the open web.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y agoTwitter is not an arm of the US government. It's like saying I don't have the right to choose what is published in my newsletter [0]. [0] I don't actually have a newsletter.
- eightysixfour 6y agoIf China sent it as a statement to every newspaper and television channel in the US, do you think they should be required to run it as a story?
- plasticxme 6y agoTwitter is a private sector business in the US with terms that include reserving the right to remove any content for any reason. They have every right to. If you don’t agree with it, for moral reasons or otherwise, you’re free to provide your own service.
- andrewclunn 6y agoDo you people just copy paste this exact comment, and replace "Twitter" with whatever social network, ISP, payment processor in question exists? Did you oppose the Civil Rights Act, which forced restaurants for example to serve blacks? Do you think there's anyone here who isn't aware that Twitter is a private company? You add nothing to the conversation when you do this, you just reiterate a neo-liberal talking point that even most self identifying libertarians disagree with now.
- purplecats 6y agookay mr oligopolist
- brighton36 6y agoTwitter runs on public infrastructure. It's beholden to the community in the same way trucks are.
- _-david-_ 6y agoParler tried to start their own service and look what is happening to them.
- farseer 6y agoThe enitity that tweeted this statement forecibly sterlized women and is presenting the results as "emancipation". This isn't disagreeable, its monsterous and diabolical. The same limits that apply to serial killers presenting their handiwork on twitter apply here as well.
- wazoox 6y ago> The enitity that tweeted this statement forecibly sterlized women Do you have the slightest evidence for this? Census data shows that Uighur population doubled in the past 30 years, because this population hasn't been subjected to the "one child policy" among other things. This is a war of propaganda, from both side. None is particularly more believable than the other. proceed with caution.
- notadog 6y agohttps://apnews.com/article/269b3de1af34e17c1941a514f78d764c https://apnews.com/article/269b3de1af34e17c1941a514f78d764c
- Noumenon72 6y agoI was interested to learn that this policy only dates back to 2014, rather than being some longtime oppression. I had thought it was more similar to America's relationship with the Native Americans. > For decades, China had one of the most extensive systems of minority entitlements in the world, with Uighurs and others getting more points on college entrance exams, hiring quotas for government posts and laxer birth control restrictions. Under China’s now-abandoned ‘one child’ policy, the authorities had long encouraged, often forced, contraceptives, sterilization and abortion on Han Chinese. But minorities were allowed two children — three if they came from the countryside. Anyway, a world where China's tweet is up and this link is the first reply to it strikes me as far better, in discourse and the availability of truth, then a world where I know I'm only allowed to read this article and China cannot defend themselves.
- farseer 6y agoThis is a good source that summarizes some of the primary accounts: https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/07/01/china-documents-uighur-genocidal-sterilization-xinjiang/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/07/01/china-documents-uighur-... I am afraid this isn't propaganda unlike the above tweet.
- IkmoIkmo 6y agoThey're not, but they can be ministry of their terms and conditions, which don't allow blatant propaganda posts (regardless of whether it's from a citizen or from a government representative) that claim victims of forced sterilisation are simply emancipating and choosing to have fewer children as an explanation for dropping birth rates. China is free to publish its nonsense on its own channels. why should Twitter agree to be a propaganda platform for China? Twitter can't police every post, but if a post gets a million views and is a blatant lie about human rights abuses, it's a bit silly to argue they should let that slide because it's an 'important statement from a foreign government'. If the NYT tweets about this statement, and attaches the proper context based on generally accepted standards of proper journalism, it wouldn't have been an issue. You can talk about things without being a propaganda piece. Hitler advertising in the NYT in the WW2 shouldn't be accepted. Journalists writing about something Hitler said and putting it in the context (i.e., mentioning the human rights abuses), is fine. Apologies for the obligatory nazi reference but it makes explaining the principe so much easier, even if China isn't as bad.
- gxnxcxcx 6y agoThe obligation to apologize for nazi references in one's rhetoric went out the window the moment actual nazis started getting mainstreamed into politics again.
- refurb 6y agoThis is what I said a year ago. You can’t moderate speech and come out the other side looking like a hero. You will only come be hated by everyone.
- evgen 6y agoBetter to be hated by everyone than counted among the nazis. You can moderate speech, but the first step is to stop caring about the opinions of the chattering classes such as is found on HN (or on Twitter for that matter.)
- loveistheanswer 6y agoIndeed. The Catholic Church successfully moderated speech for centuries for the completely benevolent cause of saving people's souls from the eternity of hell fire which awaited them if they were to fall victim to misinformation
- turbonoobie 6y agoI agree, but this needs to be sorted with regulation, and not blaming Twitter for doing bad when they're able to do what they want on their platform.
- emptyparadise 6y agoInstead of policing what Twitter can and can't allow on its website, we should look at the root of the issue: the global public square should not be controlled by a single corporation.
- YarickR2 6y agoThe root of the issue is there should be no single global public square
- emptyparadise 6y agoExactly! Decentralization is the only viable long term solution here.
- brown9-2 6y agowhich single company controls the global public square?
- pjc50 6y agoThe problem with this statement is that there's a literal "ministry of information" involved, in the Orwellian sense of a controlling censor, and it's the Chinese government: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministry_of_Industry_and_Information_Technology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministry_of_Industry_and_Infor...
- altfredd 6y agoOrwell's book actually described 3 super-states, all of which share same ideology and, presumably, have their own "ministries of truth".
- dna_polymerase 6y agoIt's not Twitter's fault that they are your only source of information. You can go elsewhere, they are a private company and owe you jack-shit.
- hombre_fatal 6y agoThat's not completely true. We (society) allow these corporations to exist and make money off of us, so there's a worthwhile discussion to have about what should be done about corporations that don't hold our values.
- consumer451 6y ago> Twitter has no right to be 'Ministry of Information'. Twitter did not prevent them from stating anything. Twitter employees simply decided they want to have no part in this. Are you saying they should be forced to publish this tweet? The logic here escapes me.
- Fellshard 6y agoThey did not publish the tweet. They provided the tools for the tweet to be published. There is a distinction, as they had no hand in the act of creating the tweet itself.
- consumer451 6y ago> There is a distinction It is a distinction with no real meaning to me, in this case. If I was an employee at Twitter working to expand the reach of my platform, and the platform was being used to brag about genocide, then I would feel partly responsible for normalizing that behavior.
- Fellshard 6y agoThen I encourage you to continue to develop distinctions and nuance, because this cuts many ways.
- consumer451 6y agoThank you, I will.
- perennate 6y agoA ministry of information would jail and possibly harvest the organs of those sending the information. As far as I know, Twitter has not arrested and harvested the organs of anyone working in the embassy.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- undersuit 6y agoYes they do! https://twitter.com/en/tos https://twitter.com/en/tos >By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through the Services, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute such Content in any and all media or distribution methods now known or later developed (for clarity, these rights include, for example, curating, transforming, and translating).
- nitwit005 6y agoThe newspapers and TV news stations also won't publish the most offensive statements from foreign leaders (or even local ones) either. You could possibly argue that things like email or telephones won't censor people, but if foreign governments tried regularly calling us to send propaganda, they'd get blocked.
- Miner49er 6y agoI agree. I'd rather Twitter ban people then just arbitrarily remove random tweets. It's not like the tweets aren't still out there somewhere. They just have decided they don't want the average person to be able to see them.
- tomc1985 6y agoThey have every right because they are a private corporation. Joke's on China if they think they can post freely without being questioned. There are not enough people holding the Chinese government's nose to the shit they're dropping.
- 8note 6y agoTwitter is definitionally a ministry of truth. They can show every tweet to everyone, so they have to pick and choose who sees what tweets. Any sorting or recommendation algorithm makes a choice about what ideas should be signal boosted and which ones should be hidden. You visit twitter to see twitter's take on what's important