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Twitter Censorship And The Future Of Authoritarianism In A High-Tech World

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Twitter is drawing some flack for its new censorship policies.

In the past, the micro-blogging service has helped dissenters across the globe communicate quickly with one another, helping spread information quickly and in ways that are difficult for repressive governments to crack down on.

That may all be changing. Jeff Bercovi has the scoop:

Twitter’s helping France and Turkey clamp down on free speech without inconveniencing users in other countries.

That’s the thrust of the company’s announcement Thursday that it will accommodate “countries that have different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression” by selectively blocking tweets at their request. While Twitter could always delete tweets if it needed to, now it can and will censor them on a country-by-country basis to comply with national laws such as  the bans on pro-Nazi speech in Germany and France.

That’s the example Twitter offered, and it’s a pretty convenient one. Who’s going to side with the Nazis? But there are plenty of other, less-palatable laws Twitter is now in a position to enforce, like Thailand’s ban on anything deemed insulting to the king, or Turkey’s similar prohibition on defaming its national founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Speaking of Turkey, it outlaws any discussion of the Armenian genocide, while France just passed a bill making it a crime to deny the genocide happened. So now Twitter can, in theory, be asked to observe both laws.

As Jeff points out, this is hardly unprecedented. Google has been blocking search results in China, for instance. Companies that want into markets in regimes with no free speech protections often compromise.

Nor is it quite as problematic as some suggest. ”I’m a little puzzled by the kind of freak out that kind of appears to be happening. Companies have to abide by the law where they are,” said Cindy Cohn, the legal director the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The real problem isn't so much in Twitter agreeing to abide by host nations' laws. The real problem is that many governments will be able to use their own technology and bad policy apparatus to stifle free speech with or without the cooperation of social media companies.

For tech enthusiasts and futurists the promise of Twitter, mobile phones, and the internet is all part of a grand new stage of human evolution; humanity unbinding itself from authoritarianism, casting off the chains of oppression and pushing one step closer toward freedom. Not everyone sees it this way.

“For the first time ever, it will become technologically and financially feasible for authoritarian governments to record nearly everything that is said or done within their borders--every phone conversation, electronic message, social media interaction, the movements of nearly every person and vehicle, and video from every street corner," writes John Villasenor of UCLA in a paper he conducted for the Brookings Institute.

That paper - Recording Everything: Digital Storage As An Enabler Of Authoritarian Governments - paints a less optimistic picture of the promise of a high-tech future.

"Pervasive monitoring will provide what amounts to a time machine allowing authoritarian governments to perform retrospective surveillance," Villasenor writes. "For example, if an anti-regime demonstrator previously unknown to security services is arrested, it will be possible to go back in time to scrutinize the demonstrator’s phone conversations, automobile travels, and the people he or she met in the months and even years leading up to the arrest."

In other words, the same technology that makes it cheap and relatively easy for protesters to organize protests, video tape abuse, and communicate rapidly to the outside world also makes it cheaper and more easy for the state to crack down. Technology is a double-edged sword like any other powerful tool.

With companies such as Twitter effectively doing the heavy lifting on behalf of governments, and threats to freedom of speech worming their way into various free trade agreements, Villasenor's predictions may be closer to reality than many of us would like to believe.

“I think Twitter is telling us some unfortunate truths,” Cohn said. “Rather than shoot the messenger, we need to put focus on to make sure we have really robust anti-censorship technologies people can use.”

Meanwhile American and Canadian software security firms have helped equip some of the world's most dangerous regimes with internet filtering software, helping governments in Iran and elsewhere stymie free speech. Technology is a wonderful tool when in the proper hands, but it's just as dangerous as it is useful when in the hands of autocrats and thugs. This simply underscores the importance of preserving our own liberties and freedom of speech here at home.

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