Just before the Turkish presidential election, the Turkish government ordered Twitter to block content that its strongman incumbent apparently found inconvenient. (The election isn’t over; a runoff is scheduled for May 28.)
We don’t know what Twitter was told to censor. All we know is that, although now guided by the somewhat pro-free-speech policies of Elon Musk, Twitter complied, saying it did so “to ensure Twitter remains available to the people of Turkey. . . .”
Journalist Matthew Yglesias tweeted that Twitter’s compliance “should generate some interesting Twitter Files reporting.” This is an allusion to internal Twitter communications released by Musk showing how readily and frequently pre-Musk Twitter censored dissenting speech at the behest of U.S. government officials.
The jibe got under Musk’s skin. “Did your brain fall out of your head, Yglesias?” Musk counter-tweeted. “The choice is have Twitter throttled in its entirety [in Turkey] or limit access to some tweets.”
But Twitter doesn’t control Turkish policies. It only controls its own policies.
Had Twitter refused and then, in turn, been throttled in Turkey, every Twitter user there would have known about the censorship by their government. Some might have protested. But only a few people in Turkey will know about the Twitter-abetted censorship.
Musk has in effect announced that Twitter will censor anything governments want if only a government willing to block Twitter does the asking. And what tyrants do is up to them.
Whether we cooperate with their tyranny when we have the means to resist?
That is up to us.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Illustration created with PicFinder.ai and DALL-E2
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2 replies on “Whose Brains Fell Out?”
If one understands the outright impossibilities of the Hyperloop and the gross implausibilities of a manned mission to Mars, then one sees Musk as a high-tech PT Barnum. That insight, in turn, causes one to consider that his political posturing is likely also to be calculated and insincere.
Given that Musk’s liberalism is little if anything more than a posture, he may simply not have understood liberalism well enough to recognize that he was betraying it.
Mr Musk should simply be treated with contempt for this action. However, we have seen far worse from Western social networking firms. In 2018, under different ownership, Twitter helped the Saudi regime to identify a journalist whom the state then tortured and killed, and that in 2002 Yahoo! provided the Chinese state with evidence used to convict and imprison a dissident. It is to be hoped that, at some point, the surviving Western perpetrators will all be very severely punished, so that short-term profit-maximization will drive less subsequent behavior.
Daniel,
I have no hope that any of the Western firms will ever be punished for their actions. They think they are planning long-term, not short-term. The US is about five percent of the global population. Rightly or wrongly, these perpetrators see their future business coming from the global south and they are not about to let principles like liberty and freedom keep them from aiding and abetting totalitarians. American users won’t turn their backs on them, either. There is no alternative available. Musk is no saint, but he’s not the devil, either. I would see his philosophy as “business is business”. Unfortunately, he’s not alone.