11 comments on HN so far, discussing politics and complaints about Twitter, and so far not one has responded to the content of the article, in which Twitter claims to have locked every account that posted a picture of a rape victim's family, violating its policy on doxxing.
Twitter locks account of India’s largest opposition party
21–30 of 74 posts
Re: Twitter locks account of India’s largest opposition party
#22Re: Twitter locks account of India’s largest opposition party
#23I hope they lose their 230 protection sooner than later.
230 is US law, we're talking about India. They could lose 230 protections and nothing would be different, in and of itself.
Re: Twitter locks account of India’s largest opposition party
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it reasonable for a public company to have terms of service which allow for the abridgement of political speech absent the commission of a crime? Twitter is affecting the internal politics of a nation by deciding who can and cannot use their platform for political purposes. And no: I would *not* defend the use of Twitter by the Nazi party if this were the 1930s. In this scenario I would expect Twitter to make an e…
Yes, I think it is reasonable. You do too, it's just that you think it's ok in some circumstances and not others.
It is unreasonable if Twitter doesn't make a statement as to why. If an intelligence agency of a foreign government had done this it would be an act of war. I don't see why Twitter should be seen as any less nefarious merely because it's a company with a ToS when they don't actually explain WHY certain decisions are made and cowardly point to a ToS as though that is an omnibus explanation for all of their actions.
Re: Twitter locks account of India’s largest opposition party
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
should we lock GOP's twitter account because a senator said masks aren't effective?
Yes
Well, you've just got it all figured out, don't you?
Thankfully, we didn't have this type of rampant censorship before the discovery of germ theory, or we'd all still be bloodletting.
Re: Twitter locks account of India’s largest opposition party
#26It's a little hard over the translation gap to understand why the account was locked... Am I understanding correctly that Twitter interpreted sharing detailed information about a murder victim as doxxing? https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/personal-info...
Yep. According to Indian laws, publishing the identities or pictures of rape victims (or their families) is illegal. Twitter really doesn't have a choice here.
Re: Twitter locks account of India’s largest opposition party
#27TechCrunch article is light on details. CNN has more information
https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/12/tech/twitter-india-congress-p...
Editing to add another article. This article mentions that it was Rahul Gandhi, the prince of the Gandhi dynasty, that first posted it and his account was temporarily locked. Then in protest, senior leaders in his party posted the same image! So their accounts were also temporarily locked.
https://indianexpress.com/article/explained/congress-rahul-g...
Re: Twitter locks account of India’s largest opposition party
#28I hope they lose their 230 protection sooner than later.
It's always worth remembering that lacking 230 protection, they won't be allowing this content... They'll be blocking more.
230 protection limits their liability if somebody uses their service to communicate information that could be civilly actionable to they platform as host if other people's words and images. Lacking that protection, vast quantities of content (potential copyright infringement, potential libel, potential slander, etc.) become too risky to host.
... And lacking 230 protection, Rand Paul and the Indian Congress Party would likely still lack any legal standard by which they could compel Twitter to host their content.
Re: Twitter locks account of India’s largest opposition party
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
What if the party’s account violated Twitter’s ToS?
Then Twitter's ToS was designed in a manner that promotes one political party above the other. It's not complicated.
Hm, maybe. But maybe, some parties are worse than others. I can think of 10s of political parties that should not have been allowed to participate in the democratic process as they (before elections) shown to condone political violence.