I’ve seen many tweets from people in Germany, USA, Turkey etc. that they can’t access their WhatsApp account. Seems to be both Iranian government and Meta.
Google pulling out of China instead of catering to censorship was a principled move, but fairly obviously did not lead to more freedom of speech in China. It helped kickstart a domestic, government-obedient tech industry. I don't know what the right move here is. Nobody who thinks there's an obvious right answer is worth listening to.
FWIW, Google said they pulled out of China for principled reasons but they did it practically for self-preservation.
Google got hacked by inside actors planted in their physical offices by the Chinese government. It's one of the very few times that Gmail's security was compromised. At the time, Google did not have the security countermeasures in place to protect against such an attack so they responded by severing the physical ties so such an attack could not be repeated. Once the BeyondCorp initiative had completed and they had the technology necessary to firewall pieces of their infrastructure where users had admin rights from other pieces of their infrastructure where users had admin rights, they reopened business in China because the risk model had changed.
Culture moves both ways. I would rather American companies not get so comfortable with blatant censorship. While we do still have some degree of censorship (and a whole lot pf privacy violation), it’s still generally seen as a taboo and not as a moral or necessary thing. Once the social standards change however, the goalpost moves and it becomes harder to maintain the same freedoms we had before.
Should American companies pull out of Germany instead of banning Nazi propaganda? The UK instead of removing court-ordered offensive speech? I mean, maybe, but since the US has the least-restricted speech of basically any nation, you are de-facto asking for a nationally partitioned internet. That's a big change.
The problem is: if you want to ban Nazi propaganda you have to develop tools to do it. Once you have tools in place you can use it to ban anything you do not like, not just Nazi propaganda.
Wouldn't this be proof that Meta is dealing with the Iranian government directly and thus violating US sanctions against Iran?
(As much as I dislike Meta —) applying foreign laws to foreign users isn't "dealing" with the Iranian government. "Dealing" in the legal sense generally requires a two-way exchange. If Iran unidirectionally imposes a regulation, that's not a deal; Meta has made no decision to enter into it.
(Reference/entry point for legal aspects about this: contracts are also invalid if they're purely unidirectional. If I remember correctly there's a LegalEagle YT video about this, but you can probably dig this up elsewhere too.)
Google pulling out of China instead of catering to censorship was a principled move, but fairly obviously did not lead to more freedom of speech in China. It helped kickstart a domestic, government-obedient tech industry. I don't know what the right move here is. Nobody who thinks there's an obvious right answer is worth listening to.
Those are two very bold claims: that Google pulled out of China for purely ideological reasons, and that the Chinese tech industry would have otherwise failed if they had stayed. We are dealing with hypotheticals here, so it's not like we can back up our propositions with actual evidence. But both ideas just seem deeply unlikely based on what we know of both Google and Chinese tech.
Culture moves both ways. I would rather American companies not get so comfortable with blatant censorship. While we do still have some degree of censorship (and a whole lot pf privacy violation), it’s still generally seen as a taboo and not as a moral or necessary thing. Once the social standards change however, the goalpost moves and it becomes harder to maintain the same freedoms we had before.
I would rather the American people elect a government that will protect their rights through laws. Meta will not violate American law. As citizens, our most effective tool is our government of the people. The idea that we rely on culture or corporate benevolence to maintain our freedoms, and not our representatives and laws... it's insane, to the say the least. I'd prefer to elect the people to protect my freedoms, n…
It’s also viable to fight for neither capital or state dominance. You have a lot of confidence in the rule of law applying to power and liberal society
Should American companies pull out of Germany instead of banning Nazi propaganda? The UK instead of removing court-ordered offensive speech? I mean, maybe, but since the US has the least-restricted speech of basically any nation, you are de-facto asking for a nationally partitioned internet. That's a big change.
The problem is: if you want to ban Nazi propaganda you have to develop tools to do it. Once you have tools in place you can use it to ban anything you do not like, not just Nazi propaganda.
Precisely. This is what it means for a company to get 'comfortable' with something. It means that given enough demand they have developed the tools necessary to do that aforementioned thing and those tools now can become accessible to any jurisdiction, even those who didn't ask for it.
This highlights the problem of communications metadata still being available to an outside observer or manipulator. A messaging network where source and destination identifiers can't be linked to real-world identifying information, such as phone numbers, would have been resistant to such censorship.
If they can't target some particular group then they just shut down the whole thing. This more highlights the problem of systems with a single point of control.
Multiple providers who federate would still not be enough. With some effort one could block every XMPP server, Jami (or Tor) node out there. You would need something like Briar which does mesh networking via Bluetooth.