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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32897 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022

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Twitter's official blog in 2011: https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/a/2011/the-tweets-must-flow.html

Our goal is to instantly connect people everywhere to what is most meaningful to them. For this to happen, freedom of expression is essential. Some Tweets may facilitate positive change in a repressed country, some make us laugh, some make us think, some downright anger a vast majority of users. We don’t always agree with the things people choose to tweet, but we keep the information flowing irrespective of any view we may have about the content.

Looking for that, I also ran across this speech by Hillary Clinton in 2011 on internet freedom. Lots of interesting things in there that would sound very out of place today.

https://2009-2017.state.gov/secretary/20092013clinton/rm/2010/01/135519.htm

In the last year, we’ve seen a spike in threats to the free flow of information. China, Tunisia, and Uzbekistan have stepped up their censorship of the internet. ... We stand for a single internet where all of humanity has equal access to knowledge and ideas. And we recognize that the world’s information infrastructure will become what we and others make of it. Now, this challenge may be new, but our responsibility to help ensure the free exchange of ideas goes back to the birth of our republic. The words of the First Amendment to our Constitution are carved in 50 tons of Tennessee marble on the front of this building. And every generation of Americans has worked to protect the values etched in that stone. ...

And censorship should not be in any way accepted by any company from anywhere. And in America, American companies need to make a principled stand. This needs to be part of our national brand. I’m confident that consumers worldwide will reward companies that follow those principles.

Now, we are reinvigorating the Global Internet Freedom Task Force as a forum for addressing threats to internet freedom around the world, and we are urging U.S. media companies to take a proactive role in challenging foreign governments’ demands for censorship and surveillance. The private sector has a shared responsibility to help safeguard free expression.

Here's Eric Schmidt decrying censorship in China in 2011: https://phys.org/news/2013-11-google-boss-freedom-speech-china.html

Twitter's official blog in 2011

Not that I love defending Twitter, but a lot has changed since 2011. That was the wild west of the internet and back when people saw the internet as a fun novelty. Social media is wayyyy more than a novelty today - we've seen social media influence elections, enable terror cells to form and communicate, drive people to suicide, and worse. Given that in 2011 they also had a much smaller user base, it's not shocking to me that they would change their tune once we realized the monster that social media has become. There's definitely an argument for how Twitter has approached this, but to argue that social media sites should be a free-for-all isn't realistic at all.

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