[liberationtech] Twitter May Censor Tweets in Individual Countries

[Craig Blaha]

Hi All,

I'm still on the fence, but some folks I respect have positive opinions of
the new policy. I wrote a very short blog post highlighting these positive
aspects (see excerpt below or full post:
http://www.newtechobserver.com/2012/01/twitters-country-specific-censorship.html).
Any corporation needs to follow established law and employ some type of
take down measure.

What bothers me more is what I see as a trend toward holding service
providers accountable for subscriber content, rather than having the
copyright provider (or the oppressive nation state) responsible for
pursuing their interests and the individual content creator. We saw this
with SOPA, we see it with Pirate Bay, and it feels like this policy shift
supports this attitude. I'd be interested to hear what others think.

Thanks,
Craig


>From the post:

In addition, Twitter has shared information on how to circumvent it's
blocking policy by manually changing your country
setting<https://support.twitter.com/articles/20169220>,
essentially associating your IP address with a different country.

This has led one well-respected blogger to comment
<http://technorati.com/In%20this%20particular%20policy,%20Twitter%20has%20done%20everything%20it%20can%20do%20to%20help%20free-speech%20advocates%20around%20the%20world%20except%20deliver%20coffee%20and%20bagels%20in%20the%20morning.>"In
this particular policy, Twitter has done everything it can do to help
free-speech advocates around the world except deliver coffee and bagels in
the morning."

The devil is in the details, so we will need to wait and see how Twitter
implements the policy and whether oppressive regimes block the site
entirely because of the easy circumvention and public awareness of
censorship.




On Wed, Feb 1, 2012 at 5:10 PM, Micah Lee <micahflee at riseup.net> wrote:

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>
> On 02/01/2012 01:52 PM, Mark Gould wrote:
> > 2, What other technologies/platforms/networks might exist as an
> > alternative to Twitter, perhaps open source and not a business,
> > that would be a viable alternative to Twitter?
>
> StatusNet is an open source alternative to Twitter: http://status.net/
>
> The biggest technical difference is that StatusNet is federated and
> anyone can run their own StatusNet node (sort of like Diaspora). The
> most popular StatusNet node is Identi.ca: https://identi.ca/
>
> The biggest social difference is barely anyone uses StatusNet when
> compared to Twitter. If you want to get your message out to thousands
> of people, you have to work a lot harder if you're not using Twitter.
>
> - --
> Micah Lee
> https://twitter.com/micahflee
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-- 
Craig Blaha
craig.blaha at gmail.com
(512) 537-5951

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