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Twitter Government Social Networks The Internet

Russia Says It's Slowing Down Twitter To Protect Citizens From Illegal Content (cnbc.com) 51

Russia has announced that it is imposing restrictions on social media platform Twitter for failing to remove illegal content from its platform. CNBC reports: The Federal Communications, Information Technology, and Mass Communications Oversight Service, also known as Roskomnadzor, announced Wednesday that it is slowing down the speed of Twitter. The communications watchdog said it was taking the measures to keep Russia's citizens safe and that it could end up blocking the service completely if Twitter doesn't respond accordingly.

Speeds will be reduced on all mobile devices and 50% of non-mobile devices, such as computers, Roskomnadzor said in a statement on its website. Roskomnadzor accused Twitter of failing to remove content that encourages minors to commit suicide, as well as child pornography, and drug use. The regulator said it asked Twitter to remove links and publications more than 28,000 times between 2017 and March 2021. It said that other social networks had been more co-operative than Twitter on removing content that encourages minors to commit suicide.

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Russia Says It's Slowing Down Twitter To Protect Citizens From Illegal Content

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  • by sabri ( 584428 ) on Wednesday March 10, 2021 @07:09PM (#61145678)
    ... "for the children".

    Always.

    "If your against our new policy of censorship then you must be in favor of child pornography!"

    "Why not use our child porn filter for terrorism?"

    "My political opponents are domestic terrorists!"

    And that's how it always goes.
  • by Anonymous Coward

    Aside from constantly stealing from every Russian citizen, Vladimir Putin is giving a textbook lesson on the need for Net Neutrality.

    Sorry Vlad. Trump is gone and heading to Prison, so your bullshit isn't going to fly anymore.

    • First Twitter,Facebook etc should be neutral on their website. There is no difference among govt censorship and corporation censorship,except for libertarians
      • There comes a point where corporate involvement in ensuring ones identity crosses a line into government. If suddenly deleting your gmail account or Facebook account renders one paralyzed to conduct many other aspects of business due to offloading authentication and single signon to these maintainers; or due to the growing requirement for 2FA, then they are bordering identify theft by locking you out. As a libertarian, I for one, see this as crossing the line into government overstep. Too many facets are no
  • You are safe now, comrade. We throw you out window to protect you from dangerous tea in airport.
    • by Anonymous Coward

      And when parents, whose kids get blackmailed into sending nudes to some creep on Twitter, and then Twitter support verifies the child's age and ID, tells them sorry, this child porn doesn't violate Twitter's TOS, and refuses to take it down and ban the distributors or even to report the criminal acts to law enforcement, until the parents themselves are forced to go to the feds to try to force Twitter to act... what are you going to do to protect them, and their kids?

      That's not a crazy hypothetical, by the w

  • Trump and the woke warriors demonstrated this extremely well.

    • by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

      That was years ago. Today twitter is demonstrating it by telling us that it's morally wrong to have families that consist of white people as that perpetuates white supremacy and that all children should be put on puberty blockers because it helps trans children.

      Fucked up part: I'm not joking. Twitter is a machine that is built to make the most insane, the most ridiculous opinions mainstream through shifting consensus as it promotes "slightly more crazy than current mainstream twitter content" at all times.

  • This is one of those rare cases.

    I do not approve of totalitarian regimes.
    But if they kill "social" media at least one good thing may have come from them.

    • by sound+vision ( 884283 ) on Wednesday March 10, 2021 @11:36PM (#61146344) Journal

      They won't kill social media, it's too valuable for surveillance and manipulation of the public. They're just lining up pretexts to move their citizens to a service that's under their total control. It's no coincidence this is happening just after the largest anti-Putin protests in many years, following another Navalny assassination attempt. (He seems really hard to kill, that guy.)

      China got started on this early and now they have essentially a parallel internet. I imagine you'll see something similar happen in lots of repressive places around the world, assuming they can get away with it. This throttling phase is probably to check the backlash, and get as many people to move over "willingly" as possible, so they don't feel like something's been taken away from them.

  • Throttle? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by swm ( 171547 ) <swmcd@world.std.com> on Wednesday March 10, 2021 @10:14PM (#61146110) Homepage

    Twitter is primarily a text medium.
    Unless they take it down to 110 baud, it's hard to see how throttling will make much difference.

    • Twitter is 140 characters of text, 50MB of javascript frameworks and third party tracking scripts.
    • They'll probably up the latency as well as throttle the bandwidth. Hold all data for 10 seconds before you send it out. Maybe with random variations in length, so you get the experience of using a really shitty website, never knowing how long the page load will be. Maybe even occasionally long enough to time-out the connection. I believe there's been research showing people are less likely to use a slow-loading site at all.

    • As if. The twitter apps and pages need a lot more bandwidth than that. Yeah, sure, in theory if they were efficient they wouldn't, but they obviously aren't.

  • Freedom restrictions always start benign and easily defeatable (for now, VPN works) and, over time, end up like it currently is in China. We need to elect different politicians in Russia.

  • ... is like a fox telling you the chickens are in trouble.

Keep up the good work! But please don't ask me to help.

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