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Twitter is blocking tweets that criticize the Indian government

thewire.in

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Re: Twitter is blocking tweets that criticize the Indian government

#161

Post by colinmhayes »

hashhar wrote: post #13
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #5

India is actually a democracy. For better or worse, I think India has the right to determine censorship policies for its citizens. Foreign Western corporations deciding that they know better than the Indian government and using their platform to spread dissent against the elected government is not a good look for a Western corporation given the history of British East India company.

Pretty sure what you are saying is the opposite of democracy. Free speech is democracy - censorship is not. Or have they succeeded in redefining it in school textbooks now?

"a system of government by the whole population or all the eligible members of a state, typically through elected representatives." Sure free speech is related to democracy, and it's hard to have a successful one without free speech, but democracy does not require free speech.

Re: Twitter is blocking tweets that criticize the Indian government

#162

Post by ehsankia »

ButtSpark69 wrote: post #113
mrtksn wrote: post #49

The expectation that a corporation operating in India will not obey Indian laws but American ones is appalling. EU, Canada, China, Turkey or North Korea - if you want to do business there you have to respect their laws. “For profit US corporation fighting foreign government atrocities” is a deeply flawed idea. If Indians believe that they need wider free speech rights or other protections, they need to change their p…

“For profit US corporation fighting foreign government atrocities” I think that's a bit of an unfair phrasing. How about "Good people upholding their morals instead of dropping them at the door when they go to work" I really am not a fan of how far we've taken the general image that 'business is business' and a bunch of regular morals are OK to toss out. We should preserve the social stigma we hold against people equ…

At the end of the day, this goes back to a debate that's been had here many times before, such as with Google's Dragonfly, which is that is Twitter doing more good being available in India with occasional censoring, or if it do more good if it wasn't available in India all.

I'm not siding one way or another, but it's not clear that taking down the platform as a whole is always a better solution than running a slightly censored one.

Re: Twitter is blocking tweets that criticize the Indian government

#163

Post by forks34 »

ButtSpark69 wrote: post #113
mrtksn wrote: post #49

The expectation that a corporation operating in India will not obey Indian laws but American ones is appalling. EU, Canada, China, Turkey or North Korea - if you want to do business there you have to respect their laws. “For profit US corporation fighting foreign government atrocities” is a deeply flawed idea. If Indians believe that they need wider free speech rights or other protections, they need to change their p…

“For profit US corporation fighting foreign government atrocities” I think that's a bit of an unfair phrasing. How about "Good people upholding their morals instead of dropping them at the door when they go to work" I really am not a fan of how far we've taken the general image that 'business is business' and a bunch of regular morals are OK to toss out. We should preserve the social stigma we hold against people equ…

No. The U.S. 300 million citizen don’t have the monopoly on morals when 1 billion Indians have a different idea about them. So don’t be pretentious, adapt to local laws and let people figure out their own ideas about life. Maybe, just maybe, the U.S. has the wrong laws.

Re: Twitter is blocking tweets that criticize the Indian government

#164

Post by gonehome »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #149
gonehome wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it definitely is currently, but it doesn't need to be. The design is such that it's possible for it to be as easy to use as FB. Running your own linux server will never be. The urbit tooling still has a way to go, but it's improving. I'm hopeful that it can get there. Mastodon is trapped by the problems of the existing software stack - they can't escape them: https://urbit.org/understanding-urbit/

You're going to need to be more specific about how Mastodon is trapped. If I go install it in docker it's going to involve more lines of code than urbit but no user cares about that. If it's hard to configure that can definitely be fixed/escaped.

It has a lot to do with federation issues on the modern internet.

- Version mismatching and updates

- Running the servers (admin, setup, config)

- Spam and problematic users

Urbit ID fixes the spam issue, Urbit OS fixes the admin and version update issues. Mastodon (but really any non-urbit system) is going to always be a mess of dependencies and things that break.

This old post (2010 before urbit was a real thing) goes into most of it: http://moronlab.blogspot.com/2010/01/urbit-functional-progra...

Re: Twitter is blocking tweets that criticize the Indian government

#165

Post by aravindet »

hesarenu wrote: post #63
aravindet wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Opindia is a well-known source of right-wing disinformation. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpIndia > OpIndia is an Indian right-wing news portal founded in 2014 by Rahul Raj and Kumar Kamal. The website has published fake news and anti-Muslim commentary on multiple occasions, including a 2020 incident in which it falsely claimed that a Hindu boy was sacrificed in a Bihar mosque. > OpIndia is dedicated to critici…

Are you saying the tweets mentioned in the article are false? (from Vindos Das, Kapri, Hansraj etc)

I am saying the tweets mentioned in the article are cherry-picked to paint this censorship in a positive light as these tweets contained false claims.

The issue at hand is that the government censored other tweets that are accurate or are statements of opinion rather than on making factual claims.

The tweets mentioned by Medianama and The Wire are are not, by any stretch of the imagination, disinformation.

They blame Modi for mismanagement and conducting super-spreader events. They draw a contrast between the government actions and rhetoric around Tablighi Jamaat (a muslim religious event with perhaps a few thousand participant that happened at the beginning of the panedmic) and the Kumbh mela (a hindu religious event with hundreds of thousands or perhaps millions of participants, happening now.) They tweet pictures of cremation grounds.

I don't consider them disinformation, and neither does Twitter (they would have been deleted otherwise.)

I would quote those tweets, but I occasionally travel to India so I do not feel safe doing that. The Wire and Medianama feel unsafe reproducing these tweets, while OP India does not - that should tell you something.

Re: Twitter is blocking tweets that criticize the Indian government

#166

Post by hunter-2 »

manub22 wrote: post #97
hunter-2 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The list of tweets removed are here: https://thewire.in/tech/as-covid-19-crisis-deepens-twitter-t... Anybody with a VPN or is outside India can indeed read and make their mind up. Edit: Every propaganda has an inkling of truth to it. That's why people believe it. And that's how everyone from Goebbels to the current Indian administration operate. Cherrypicking just the obviously fake ones to make your point is silly.

The pics of pyres shared in the tweet were common in India before the Covid started. Just go to any crematorium in India and you will see similar situation, dead bodies keeps on coming and their relatives burn them and do the last rites. Its not new to India, but the way its portrayed that pyres are only due to Corona pandemic is totally wrong !!!

So you are denying India even has a Covid emergency?

Re: Twitter is blocking tweets that criticize the Indian government

#167

Post by jb775 »

mrtksn wrote: post #49

The expectation that a corporation operating in India will not obey Indian laws but American ones is appalling. EU, Canada, China, Turkey or North Korea - if you want to do business there you have to respect their laws. “For profit US corporation fighting foreign government atrocities” is a deeply flawed idea. If Indians believe that they need wider free speech rights or other protections, they need to change their p…

[flagged]

Re: Twitter is blocking tweets that criticize the Indian government

#168

Post by mrtksn »

gonehome wrote: post #156
mrtksn wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who says what's wrong or unethical? Would you consider unethical or wrong to take people's guns away? UK, EU or Australia might disagree with the US on this. What about abortion? What about regulation on what goes into your body? What about blasphemy? What about ending your own life? What about pre-marital sex? What about changing your religion? What about drawing Muhammeds cartoon? What about many other things that…

Just because it's not always easy to get consensus doesn't mean all positions are equally valid. In countries with rule of law, elections, and free press, the law in that country holds more importance than unelected dictatorships with state controlled media. Small L liberalism has a lot of values around the things you suggest: free speech, freedom of expression, laws against violence. A lot of these values make the a…

I don't say they are all equally valid but what's the solutions here? Impose your own rights as long as you can? I guess that's an option but it leads to armed conflicts.

As for the "US superiority" argument, some argue that US is no different than North Korea, maybe US corporations should consider Nordic morales and laws when doing business in India then? After all, according to democracy index Norway is much more democratic than the US.

People stormed the Capitol a few months back and according to the polls a significant portion of the US population thinks that the elections in the USA are not fair and the sitting president is installed there by a deep state cabal. However ridiculous I find these claims, as you can see, it's not a clear cut in the US too. Twitter was even considered a part of the conspiracy.

Indians might ask, why should they be subjected to the morals of US deep state cabal?

Sounds ridiculous but only if you are not among the majority[0] of the Republican party voters.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/nov/10/election-tru...

Re: Twitter is blocking tweets that criticize the Indian government

#169

Post by benque »

CommanderData wrote: post #119

The comments here read like most other threads on the Internet. Heavy defence of censorship. Its a bit like China. When the concept "face" is being compromised, its vital to cover up the issue then to actually deal with the problem.

Story of most countries in the East. We would rather claim that there is no problem rather than accept, analyze, and possibly come up with solutions.

Re: Twitter is blocking tweets that criticize the Indian government

#170

Post by alkonaut »

vmception wrote: post #99
alkonaut wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My expectation isn't that a US tech company would break local law. It's that it would get out of market where it would otherwise be forced to do things that doesn't agree with some fundamental values of the company.

> some fundamental values of the company they do you just misinterpreted what the fundamental values were

My second expectation is that I expect companies not to have "deliver maximum value to its shareholders" as its fundamental value or guiding principle (Unsure if that's what you were alluding to here). That is: I basically expect companies to leave huge amounts of (their investors') money on the table when it goes against the ethical/moral compass of a vocal minority of its users, owners, or employees.
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