blame the right hand, not the left hand

An article here argues that because Twitter has announced it will take down content it believes contravenes local laws, the company itself is not instrumental in that; it’s all the fault of the governments concerned.

The thing is, the distinction here is without much of a difference. Largely privatised economic environments require collaborative censorship. That’s how it works in in China, where the vast majority of the work of censorship is done by private companies, often without much day to day contact with the state: ‘self-discipline’ is the term. This can often involve quite baroque levels of information management, again worked out by relevant companies.

There are supposed to be six levels of censorship on the Sina Weibo service, for instance. Let’s say you start tweeting about horrendous cases of land seizures, corruption, or general abuse of power. You notice that the level of retweets goes down; that you have fewer followers; that you’re not involved in conversations so much. You tweet about other stuff, and it seems like all your old friends have returned. Once more, you have joined the conversation. Maybe the people who say that China is just not interested in change are right. What’s happened is that you’ve been managed back into a more ‘constructive’ frame of mind by an administrative dialing down of your connectivity, all without the necessity of anyone tipping their hand by directly deleting your stuff.

It doesn’t quite work out that smoothly. Sina Weibo is supposed to have 500 people on this stuff – it admits to 100 - which is not enough for a user base of 200 million or so. But it does show what a can-do entrepreneurial spirit can bring to the censorship party. And just think of the export market! David Cameron wouldn’t have to switch off twitter if there was another round of riots after all.

So what we’re actually seeing here – and also with the proposed SOPA legislation in the US – is a move towards the Chinese model of collaborative censorship. All the collaborators are responsible for it.

And as an aside, it is annoying when so-called free speech supporters turn out to be more interested in protecting the reputation of technology companies when any direct issue arises. It reminds me of the furore over Hossam el-Halalwy’s piggipedia last year, when people were outraged not because he’d been prevented from identifiying assorted thugs, goons and torturers from Egypt’s Central Security, but because he’d contravened Facebook’s terms of service.

Comments

[Cian]

There are distributed alternatives to both twitter and facebook (kind of P2P), which are open. Built by the usual paranoid hacker types. Neither have taken off for fairly obvious reasons.

But... if facebook and twitter continue to make it their policy to piss off their users. Or there's a high level court case. Who knows? Who remembers Myspace after all.

I wonder if in ten years the idea of centralised services like twitter and facebook will seem as strange as usenet and the early web do to us now.

[Ross Smith]

It seemed pretty clear to me that this was just today's iteration of the standard glibertarian "government is the root of all evil" axiom. If the Sacred Free Market appears to be producing a result we don't like, that just means we have to put even more effort into coming up with a line of argument that proves it's really all the fault of the Evil State, and self-interested business is as innocent as it must always be.