Twitter Accused of 'Deliberately' Defying Indian Government's New Social Media Rules (reuters.com) 85
Twitter has "deliberately" defied and failed to comply with India's new social media rules, according to the country's technology minister Ravi Shankar Prasad. Reuters reports that the rules, which became effective in late May, make social media companies "more accountable to legal requests for swift removal of posts and sharing details on the originators of messages. The rules also require big social media companies to set up grievance redressal mechanisms and appoint new executives to coordinate with law enforcement."
A senior government official told Reuters that Twitter may no longer be eligible to seek liability exemptions as an intermediary or the host of user content in India due to its failure to comply with new IT rules. "There are numerous queries arising as to whether Twitter is entitled to safe harbour provision," Prasad tweeted. "However, the simple fact of the matter is that Twitter has failed to comply with the Intermediary Guidelines that came into effect from the 26th of May."
Twitter, Prasad added, had chosen the "path of deliberate defiance when it comes to the Intermediary Guidelines."
Twitter did not respond to a request for comment though it said on Monday it was keeping India's technology ministry apprised of the steps it was taking. "An interim Chief Compliance Officer has been retained and details will be shared with the Ministry directly soon," it said. "Twitter continues to make every effort to comply with the new guidelines.
New Delhi-based digital advocacy group Internet Freedom Foundation said it was only up to courts, and not the government, to decide whether companies such as Twitter remained intermediaries for alleged non-compliance such as appointment of executives.
Twitter, Prasad added, had chosen the "path of deliberate defiance when it comes to the Intermediary Guidelines."
Twitter did not respond to a request for comment though it said on Monday it was keeping India's technology ministry apprised of the steps it was taking. "An interim Chief Compliance Officer has been retained and details will be shared with the Ministry directly soon," it said. "Twitter continues to make every effort to comply with the new guidelines.
New Delhi-based digital advocacy group Internet Freedom Foundation said it was only up to courts, and not the government, to decide whether companies such as Twitter remained intermediaries for alleged non-compliance such as appointment of executives.
Wait, what? (Score:1)
They want them to act as a moderator and censor so they can keep their safe harbour provision status. Meaning they want them to moderate their user's content so they don't have to moderate their user's content. Da fuck?
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This is conceptually how safe harbor provisions have always worked. The alternative was that any moderation causes a site to be reclassified as if it was a publisher (think newspaper), where now all content is considered approved by the editor.
Many of the popular social sites today have decided they like their own rules better than the law, and for one India seems to be stepping up to let them know that's not how this works.
Being fair to twitter, as social media platforms become a largely worldwide phenome
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If you censor, you are moderating, you are then publishing -- > you are a publisher and deserve no 230 protection.
Well, you're citing a US law, but that's not how it works in the US. Instead the rule is that 47 USC 230(c)(1) says that a site is never a publisher ever, except for content it generates itself, regardless of anything else. So this means that Twitter could call itself a publisher, it could edit tweets arbitrarily, and it still would not be a publisher, and therefore never has the liability that a publisher has.
Weirdly, you seem to be totally ignorant of the law, since you're saying that if you do the thin
annoying (Score:2, Insightful)
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Annoying governments making annoying laws are annoying. Twitter should build an artificial island so it can make its own laws. Every nation will want to host a Twitter embassy because all the people love Twitter because Twitter isn't annoying.
Speaking of annoying, do you know what people would do if Twitter were to announce their pending demise due to lack of participation?
Fucking tweet about it.
The fact that Twitter can't die, certainly restores my faith in humanity. Gotta love mass narcissism.
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That's fine but how much money can they make on an island? They need to be in India to do business in India, and are subject to Indian laws.
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Twitter is defying legitimate laws.
WTF? The technology minister wants a government shill as an executive in Twitter. How is that "legitimate"? What if President Trump told twitter they had to put one of his shills on the board of directors or he'd shut them down? President Biden doesn't need to make such demands, there's already Democrat Party shills running the company.
To make this stop Twitter needs to remove their own ability to moderate content. They would then be acting like an open platform, living up to their claims that everyone
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To make this stop Twitter needs to remove their own ability to moderate content. They would then be acting like an open platform, living up to their claims that everyone has the right to communicate.
Or just remove all website operation and moderation powers to a foreign subsidiary that resides outside India's jurisdiction, And make the India company's sole purpose be a subcontractor to Sell the Advertisement placements.
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Then the Indian government keeps them from selling advertising. What if Twitter still doesn't cave in? Then the Indian government blocks access to the Twitter servers outside of the country. After that Twitter cannot sell advertising in India, even to foreign companies.
I doubt Twitter will cave to stay open in India. If that was an option they were willing to consider then they'd have caved to the far less intrusive demands in Nigeria. All Nigeria wanted was Twitter to not block the government. Twitte
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To make this stop Twitter needs to remove their own ability to moderate content. They would then be acting like an open platform, living up to their claims that everyone has the right to communicate.
If Twitter did this then most of their users would abandon he platform. Furthermore, it isn’t clear that doing so would be a magic bullet to protect them from gov’t demands as you suggest. In fact, in the case of India, doing this would probably get them kicked out of the country.
Your solution is not a solution. The obsession with excising moderation from the internet has really clouded the judgement of many /. users.
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If Twitter did this then most of their users would abandon he platform.
Why? People come to Twitter to see what people want to tweet. If people don't want to know what someone has to say then they don't have to follow that person. People have the right to speak, but they don't have the right for people to listen. If people don't want to listen to the president of Nigeria then they don't have to. If Twitter believes that everyone has the right to speak then they'd let the president of Nigeria tweet.
Furthermore, it isnâ(TM)t clear that doing so would be a magic bullet to protect them from govâ(TM)t demands as you suggest. In fact, in the case of India, doing this would probably get them kicked out of the country.
There is no good choice for Twitter here, only the least bad. They can lose
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If there were no moderation on Twitter, people would have to spend an inordinate amount of time blocking others. Your feed might just show people you follow, but with every post anyone can reply. We all saw what happened to /. during the election—there weren't enough mod points/time to deal with all the trolls.
What makes Twitter popular is that public figures communicate with the public on it. I don't see those same public figures wanting to invest the time in a platform that allows trolls and bots to
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You can say that all you want, but that won't make it true. Moderation is a form of censorship. Not government censorship, necessarily, but the government was never a part of the definition of "censorship" until people recently started trying to redefine it.
Some censorship may be necessary and even desirable, but people just sound pitiful when they try to redefine the word to exclude whatever they want to do.
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Re:Bounties (Score:5, Insightful)
Why on earth do you think the Indian Twitter subsidiary, incorporated in India is an American company subject to American rules?
And tell me why would a true red, white & blue American company, incorporated in the good old US of A, and trading on that bastion of the free market NASDAQ ever in a million years turn down the chance to make a killing in a foreign market like they're doing in India?
"American rules" in Twitters case are for all practical purposes "make as much money as possible by any means necessary". And they are following those not just to the letter, but the true spirit as well.
""""defiance"""" (Score:2)
Last I checked, Twitter is a company based in America, and as such is subject only to American laws. Any laws followed beyond that is a courtesy at best. Go ahead India, throw a tantrum and block Twitter while ignoring the smorgasbord of problems with your country. The fact other countries can access it is irrelevant, at that point the legal responsibility falls unto the user.
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They want to collect money from Indian advertisers so they have to have a local office. They could of course go non-profit and ignore Indian laws but fat chance of that happening.
Re: """"defiance"""" (Score:3)
LOL
Twitter has a revenue generating entity in India called Twitter Communications India Pvt Ltd.
Itâ(TM)s their biggest market outside of the US.
Go find out what India did to TikTok.
Re: """"defiance"""" (Score:5, Insightful)
Last I checked, Twitter is a company based in America, and as such is subject only to American laws. Any laws followed beyond that is a courtesy at best. Go ahead India, throw a tantrum and block Twitter while ignoring the smorgasbord of problems with your country. The fact other countries can access it is irrelevant, at that point the legal responsibility falls unto the user.
LOL
Twitter has a revenue generating entity in India called Twitter Communications India Pvt Ltd.
Itâ(TM)s their biggest market outside of the US.
Go find out what India did to TikTok.
Never mind what the US tried to do to TikTok. You'd think that by his logic and by virtue of them being a Chinese corporation based in China, only Chinese rules and laws would apply to TikTok when operating in the USA. Apparently the privilege of being immune to local laws only applies to US entities.
Huawei (Score:3)
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Random shell company to hire people who speak the language to be discarded at a moment's notice when they start to get a bit too uppity. Welcome to business.
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Last I checked, Twitter is a company based in America, and as such is subject only to American laws. Any laws followed beyond that is a courtesy at best.
Do you seriously believe the nonsense you just typed?
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They could also issue an arrest warrant against Jack Dorsey. Outside of India that might not be worth the paper its printed on but would prevent him from ever going to India. This could also restrict his movements outside the United States depending on what countries India has extradition treaties with. I don't know exactly how extensive these treaties are but the United States might even hand him over to India.
India maybe a "3rd world" country but they do has some legal clout on the world stage.
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Extradition treaties usually have clauses about a crime having to be roughly equally a crime in both nations with roughly the same penalty. Most western nations would not extradite Jack for speech crime.
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Yes, that is a possibility, though it depends on politics as much as anything. Canada has a habit of bending over backwards for American political crime extradition requests, which we shouldn't do if we want to claim to be a free country. There was Marc Emery's extradition for selling seeds, barely a crime in Canada, possible life sentence in America, so shouldn't have been extradited. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] see 2005
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Most western nations would not extradite Jack for speech crime.
Tell that to Julian Assange. It all depends on the political climate. If things are hot enough in that area there are a number of countries that would be more than happy to tie up Jack's ass up like a Christmas goose complete with bow.
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Good point. I was thinking that America wouldn't consider Jack a dissident, so other western nations wouldn't follow America's lead. Also as the main laws targeting dissidents speech in America use national security reasons, it might be harder to target Jack.
Turning Autocratic (Score:5, Interesting)
Back in September 2020, the Modi government passed three Acts of Parliament covering agriculture, known as the Farm Bills [wikipedia.org].
Protests were swift and pretty significant [wikipedia.org], largely because Indian's farmers and farming unions argued that the laws would leave farmers at the mercy of big corporates.
What started out as local protests, originating in Punjab, quickly escalated to a movement that became known as ilhi Chalo (Translation: "Let's go to Delhi"), that prompted tens of thousands to march on Delhi. The entire escapade left Modi with a metaphoric black eye. In large part, the movement became so powerful so quickly because of the ability of the participants to organize through social media, including Facebook, Twitter and Whatsapp.
In response, the Modi government has begun a systematic crackdown on social media platforms as an attempt to undercut the ability of citizens to use them for coordinating a protest - they want to make it much harder for citizens to make their voice heard, except in a manner that the government can control and approve.
Among the more chilling provisions in what the Modi government have demanded are to have the ability to demand the instant removal of any content that the government decrees to be unlawful (i.e. the government and not the judiciary). There is also a provision [reuters.com] which requires social media companies to "assist in probes or other cyber security-related incidents within 72 hours of receiving a request", but the definition of "other {cyber} security-related incidents" may well have been written in a way that allows the government to, for example, define a farmers' protest as a "security-related incident" and through this means use that designation to force the media companies to remove all content relating to the coordination of, say, a march the Delhi.
The same provisions give the government the ability to demand the identity of users posting content that the government deem illegal. Again, the government, not the country's judiciary.
In other words, this looks very much like a more serious version of Trump's rage against Tik-Tok, after Tik-Tok took a victory lap [vox.com], claiming that they had disrupted that Trump rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
It seems to me that those with autocratic tendencies - and Modi is showing the signs after 7 years in office - are nudging each-other to see how far they can go with clamp-downs before there are uprisings and attempts to throw them out of office. Indeed, it seems that the longer a leader remains in office, the greater the risk of their developing autocratic tendencies.
The idea of term limits is starting to look like a mandatory requirement for "democracy"...
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Representative government was introduced to the world through a change in the UK, where the King wanted to wage war on Spain, but didn't have the funds to do so. In negotiations with the "land barons" - basically proxies appointed
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Representative government was introduced to the world through a change in the UK,
It existed in the Roman republican era. Even in England it was the 13th not 15th century and nothing to do with Spain. Not that either instances were that representative of the ordinary person, but that didn't happen really anywhere much, apart from a few isolated instances, until after WW1.
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Emphasis mine. And who decides which decisions are major? Your representative?
Re: Turning Autocratic (Score:2)
So we certainly don't need to elect representatives, because we don't communicate via "fast horse" any more
This would give a lot of power without accountability to the person (s) drafting the plebiscites. Take your example : start a war. In this, there are 2 major directions the drafter might take :
1. Cause the war to happen : so they will club the war proposal with cheap oil, or more jobs, or cheaper other goods. So that people either choose no war and less jobs (e.g.) or war and more jobs. They will justify it by attributing those good effects to the war. By sufficient incentive clubbing, people can be "forced
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Specifically, you are saying that just because we may consider a change in the operating model from representative democracy to direct democracy, that with it must automatically come resolutions that bundle popular and unpopular motions [like a tax break and a proposal to go to war] in an attempt to dupe a careless populous in to voting for them.
Why would
Re: Turning Autocratic (Score:2)
Because , people?
Why maliciously co-mingled ? Because, people are malicious.
If you don't mingle? I already gave an example where tax for a purpose was separated from that purpose itself (war), leading to "engineering" of plebiscites supporting the cause of the drafter.
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What sort of fucking moron believes the American system of government was ever meant to be a direct democracy or even lead to one?
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The pedant strikes again!
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Anything less would require the Dems to publicly face the fact they elected a dementia ridden old man whose brains are pudding and whose son is a corrupt crackhead felon that illegally tries to acquire firearms and is probably a pedophile pervert. At least, I don't know what else you would call a guy who walks around naked while facetimeing 14 year olds.
Covid Wave 2 (Score:2, Informative)
Dear India (Score:2)
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Literally clean up your shit, since most Indians don't have indoor plumbing.
Tell this to the illegal immigrants flooding the US southern border who insist on throwing used toilet paper either in trash cans or on the floor.
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If it's the latter, I'm not sure why I should have sympathy for humans who haven't learned a fucking thing about fecal-borne diseases that have killed an insane amount of humans. Your Darwin Award, awaits.
Exactly. In many places in South Texas and Arizona they actually have signs in Spanish telling people to not throw used toilet paper in the trash or leave it on the floor.
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Many rural Americans will throw used toilet paper in the trash to extend the life of their septic system. Usually in these households the general rule is to flush it for #2 and put it in the trash for anything else.
Perhaps the most ironic part about your post is that, in several countries where bidets are commonly used, Americans are considered uncivilized and wasteful for using toilet paper.
I present those facts to emphasize that people throughout the world often find different solutions to the same proble
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Many rural Americans will throw used toilet paper in the trash to extend the life of their septic system. Usually in these households the general rule is to flush it for #2 and put it in the trash for anything else.
Perhaps the most ironic part about your post is that, in several countries where bidets are commonly used, Americans are considered uncivilized and wasteful for using toilet paper.
I present those facts to emphasize that people throughout the world often find different solutions to the same problem. But don’t let that stand in the way of your racism.
They're using modern flush plumbing and sewage systems, so they don't have to worry about a septic tank. If you use a bidet, then you don't use toilet paper and the problem is solved. Regardless, I'm not quite sure how you jump from "don't throw toilet paper with fecal matter on it on the floor or in the trash" to racism. If it were a cultural norm wherever someone was from to whip it out in a schoolyard and urinate in a sandbox in front of a bunch of kids, would you support that too? And I'm sure having a
So, don't censor anything. (Score:2, Troll)
If Twitter wants to claim to be a platform for open and free debate then they need to act like it. Tell the Indian government they will not comply with take down orders because their system is not built to censor anyone. Then actually build a system where people cannot be censored.
This might be difficult but not impossible. We have e-mail as an example. Once someone sends an e-mail there is no taking it back. Twitter wants the legal immunity of an ISP, and they can have it if they act like an ISP. Tha
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If Twitter had not demonstrated such willingness to censor it's users then they'd have a better case to tell the Indian government where to go.
No they wouldn't. We don't live in a fairy tale.
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Right now, Twitter has no real defense for not censoring Tweets according to Indian law -- they censor Tweets according to their private ideas of what is good or bad, without any legal obligation to do so. Now their only real argument is that they don't like India's censorship laws as much as they like their private rules, which is a lame argument.
If they had much more limited and well-defined rules for censorship, they could point to those as a reason to ignore India's requests. But they wrote their rule
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Tell the Indian government they will not comply with take down orders because their system is not built to censor anyone. Then actually build a system where people cannot be censored.
And the Indian government will tell them to fix their shit so they can or GTFO which is exactly what it happening now. Twitter could choose to leave a lot of money on the table, but why would they? Their a company operating in the interests of their shareholders and that ain't you, bud.
This might be difficult but not impossible
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And the Indian government will tell them to fix their shit so they can or GTFO which is exactly what it happening now. Twitter could choose to leave a lot of money on the table, but why would they? Their a company operating in the interests of their shareholders and that ain't you, bud.
That's right, it's happening now and caving in will not make it better for them. Twitter loses either way. The lesser loss though it by not becoming a government shill. So long as Twitter censors content governments will come along to coerce them into doing government censorship. Twitter likely loses India with any choice here. They become a lackey for the government and people leave because Twitter is no longer an open platform. They stand up for their freedom and that of their users and the governme
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I keep seeing people defend Twitter's censorship in that they are a private company and so may censor as they wish. I agree. The problem is that when they start to censor because the government tells them to then they become an agent of the government, not a private company. They are then taking orders from the national technology minister like any government employee would. This is now the government restricting people's freedom to communicate.
Yes. It IS restricting a government's freedom to communicate, because said government uses it to communicate.
I see this actually working one of two ways; either ban all government officials from using Twitter, or enforce Constitutional law against Twitter, and drop this "my lawn, my content" bullshit argument. You're not convincing anyone that there is no impact to Twitter censorship when leaders of entire countries use it.
Personally, I prefer the former option. It's time we put our "Representatives" ba
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C-SPAN? Who watches C-SPAN? Who watches TV? There are people that will leave their phone bill unpaid to pay their cable bill, as I recall from a survey some time ago, but they are not paying that bill to watch C-SPAN.
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C-SPAN? Who watches C-SPAN? Who watches TV? There are people that will leave their phone bill unpaid to pay their cable bill, as I recall from a survey some time ago, but they are not paying that bill to watch C-SPAN.
If the only place you could go to hear or see a politician speak online was C-SPAN...they'd probably secure the audience that actually gives a shit about that tripe.
And then perhaps the rest of society could stop pretending they care so much about inflammatory political cheerleading.
everybody loves freedom of speech (Score:2)
religion uses the term blasphemy to fight parts of freedom of speech they dont like...
politicians know this and just uses a lot of treachery in their language to get around it...
FUCK India (Score:1)
Twitter will respond by banning India (Score:2)
And Indians will celebrate. The date may even become a calendar holiday.
Seems simple enough (Score:4, Informative)
The country can just block Twitter.
I mean, that's what the USA was going to do at one point with TikTok, wasn't it?
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No Trump wanted Oracle to "buy" TikTok using mafia tactics because lots of people on there were making fun of him. Free market indeed.