From the excellent Circuit blog:
Last week Thailand became the first country in the world to endorse Twitter’s new censorship policy. Despite the fact that this policy may not be as draconian as it first appears, the Thai government’s speed in applauding it is telling. It speaks to both the government’s appreciation of the political power of the internet and its understanding of the fact that it cannot control the relationship between its citizens and the internet alone but needs the assistance of social media giants like Twitter. Access Contested: Security, Identity and Resistance in Cyberspace, the third edited volume published by the OpenNet Initiative (ONI), deals precisely with this issue of ‘co-constituted’ control of the political impact of the internet. ONI’s brief is to ‘investigate, expose and analyse Internet filtering and surveillance practices in a credible and non-partisan fashion’, and the first two volumes in the series, Access Denied and Access Controlled, analyse government filtering and censorship practices the world over.
Read the full review here (and note that Curcuit have a copy of the book to give away for contributors to the discussion).
11 responses so far ↓
1 Andrew Spooner // Feb 5, 2012 at 6:47 pm
Funny how everyone is focusing on Thailand’s signing up to Twitter censorship yet forget that the first major power that posited it was the UK during the riots last August.
In fact I would guess Twitter’s policy is possibly a reaction to the UK govt’s original intervention.
Also for a full-throated discussion on cyber-utopianism check out Evgeny Morozov’s Net Delusion . He takes a sledgehammer to many of the received wisdoms. And rightly so.
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2 Jon Wright // Feb 5, 2012 at 9:36 pm
In the UK they were saying they wanted to switch off some service – not Twitter, it was Blackberry or Facebook, I think – in a certain area while there was civil unrest going on. This discussion is about Twitter providing the ability to not have a certain tweet visible in a certain country (but re-tweets are fine) .
Completely unrelated.
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3 Mr Damage // Feb 5, 2012 at 10:33 pm
All quasi fascist states love censorship, close scrutiny of their ineptitude, nepotism, favoritism, pandering and corruption is far from welcome, don’t forget US, China and Australia as part of the club. Only intelligent and honest government invites free speech, hence the complete lack of its appeal.
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4 V. // Feb 5, 2012 at 10:34 pm
The work around it to go into settings menu on Twitter and change your country. Twitter identifies the IP you use as in Thailand and would use the Thai filter. Overriding that is simply select on the dropdown menu that you are in Burkina Faso or where ever. Problem solved.
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5 George // Feb 6, 2012 at 1:26 am
Twitter’s offer to the various interested governments is actually a “faux” offer. Any person resident in a country which is censoring Twitter need only go to his/her Profile Settings and substitute “worldwide” or some other country other than his own country and the censorship targeted for his own country will no longer apply…….
It gets Twitter off the hook of operating “illegally” in various countries without seriously inconveniencing the core reason many people use and value Twitter.
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6 Andrew Spooner // Feb 7, 2012 at 8:57 am
Jon Wright
Nope UK government wanted to block twitter and ban those convicted in the “riots” from using all social media.
Read this http://www.theatlanticwire.com/global/2011/08/twitter-braces-censorship-following-uk-riots/41127/
David Cameron is quoted as saying
“We are working with the police, the intelligence services and industry to look at whether it would be right to stop people communicating via these websites and services when we know they are plotting violence, disorder and criminality,” Cameron added. “Free flow of information can be used for good, but it can also be used for ill.”
This was 6months ago.
Thailand, PT and even Malika are way, way behind the curve.
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7 Jon Wright // Feb 7, 2012 at 3:38 pm
Andrew Spooner: I missed those calls to ban transgressors from online ‘social networks’ at the time they were voiced – even so you’re talking about a completely different kettle of fish – as you accept with your final statement: “Thailand, PT and even Malika are way, way behind the curve“. And in the intervening months I think most of those protagonists over in the UK have backed off from their heat-of-the-moment suggestions.
Closer to reality was the fuss in California a few months ago where the Internet was switched off along a commuter route that activists were using to get to a protest.
But this Twitter-Thailand thing was way overblown. Thailand ‘endorsed’ it; the EFF had already done the same. Nothing to see here, move along. [I'm not a Twitter user.]
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8 Andrew Spooner // Feb 7, 2012 at 4:11 pm
Jon Wright
Yep, overblown.
But then so are the claims Twitter is providing some kind of new form of liberty.
It isn’t.
It’s a private company looking to make money.
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9 Ralph Kramden // Feb 7, 2012 at 5:20 pm
Jon@7: Thailand hardly “endorsed” it; rather MICT immediately welcomed it and explained that they would use this facility.
On EFF, this hardly sounds like a ringing endorsement either:
Free speech and digital rights organization Electronic Frontier Foundation defended Twitter’s changes in a Jan. 27, 2012 blog post, and asked supporters to “keep Twitter honest” and to circumvent censorship. “For now, the overall effect is less censorship rather than more censorship, since they used to take things down for all users. But people have voiced concerns that ‘if you build it, they will come,’ – if you build a tool for state-by-state censorship, states will start to use it. We should remain vigilant against this outcome.”
For now…. We should remain vigilant…. That seems pretty fare removed from the notion of “Nothing to see here, move along.”
Recall, too, the link on this to EFF: Twitter will notify users if their message is removed, indicate to all viewers that a Tweet has been withheld, and publish the takedown requests on Chilling Effects, a website run by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and several American universities.
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10 Jon Wright // Feb 8, 2012 at 2:57 am
Ralph, I put the word endorsed in quotes as I was quoting the extract in the summary above. If you don’t like that word please take issue with the article, not the commenter.
As I mentioned, I’m not a Twitter user, but I thought Twitter was a real-time medium – taking down a ‘tweet’ is far removed from taking down a blog post, isn’t it? By the time it’s been taken down it’s already been consumed, re-tweeted. And on a practical level, as commenters above seem to be suggesting, there seem to be multiple routes around the block for people in Thailand.
> “Recall, too, the link on this to EFF …”
What do you mean?
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11 Chris Beale // Feb 8, 2012 at 4:41 am
Ralph – I’m a member of EFF : regularly receive their e-mails, etc.
Thanks for posting this – which helps get through the clutter.
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