On #Twittercensorship
Today, I am not talking on Twitter because Twitter has decided to voluntarily begin censoring for oppressive countries who do not like free speech. They won't call it censorship directly, because that might offend some lawyers. So instead, when they get a request to censor someone's account, they'll just say "This account is withheld in your country, by request." Like house arrest on the Internet, without a trial, just because Twitter feels like ignoring free speech. This isn't a request from any government yet. Twitter just felt like putting a process in place to strip any user of their right to speak freely, in case any government needed it someday.
No, I'm not really sure why they just gave up all our rights so callously. But I'm angry enough about it that I'm willing to join an an organized protest. So I'm staying off of Twitter for one day as part of #Twitterblackout. It won't change anything, and I'm sure Twitter is seeing no appreciable dip in the flow of scheduled tweets from people hucking their wares, as well as the assortment of people who didn't get the memo that Twitter has embraced censorship on the grounds that "We have to follow the rules."
Twitter did this right after a protest was organized to blackout web sites all over the world in protest of SOPA and PIPA. (You may recall, my sites were all blacked out that day.) The folks at Twitter think that in spite of all these protests for free speech, what's in their best corporate interests is to comply with any take down order from ANY government authority. Trial? No, not needed. Twitter will voluntarily silence dissidents as a fucking courtesy to the evil dictators. Hey, just a side effect of doing business in a global society. Sure, it means embracing censorship wherever a government justifies it, but hey, it's not like Twitter is a global news source of human right violations or anything.
This isn't what pisses me off, because big businesses are always capable of pointing at a rulebook to justify cruel and inhumane policies. No, what pissed me off was watching another blogger comment that she didn't see a reason to be upset, because this isn't about America. It's about other countries. This right after the Occupy protests and your press being forced into "press pens" so they couldn't wander around and actually report on the abuses the police were making on civilians practicing their constitutional rights to protest and practice free speech. And now the company who helped Americans report on all those police abuses when the media did not, JUST VOLUNTEERED TO WITHHOLD TWEETS FOR ANY GOVERNMENT.
Yet, this other blogger is able to practice cognizant disassociation to keep up her deluded views that this isn't something that will affect her in America. It's only foreign countries with dictatorships that will abuse this request system. And besides, this isn't about people being abused by governments. This is about Twitter needing to grow as a corporation. And they can't flourish if they don't agree to help certain governments with voluntary censorship. Therefore, even if she's agreed that censorship is very bad, here it only makes sense for Twitter to make a policy that no one had yet asked for, nor had the right to ask for yet. Because removing any possibility of due process for Twitter's clients is good for business…somehow. Anywho, censorship of this sort could never happen in her country, in her opinion, so there's no reason to feel outrage. Why? BECAUSE IT DOESN'T AFFECT HER.
And this is why I keep losing my shit and asking "What's wrong with you people?" Even when a threat is presented to you in very clear terms, it's not a really real threat unless I can make it about you. So I can tell you how anti-gay countries will request Twitter to shut down the accounts of gay activists a few weeks before they're arrested and killed quietly, their voices voluntarily stripped by a corporation who promises "transparency" in explaining their reasons for censoring. I could tell you about dictators who will shut down political activists and send them to prison for life, simply for asking for the same human rights that Americans piss away day after day with no sense of concern.
But unless I can tell you "This is how Twitter's policy could bite you in the ass," you don't care. I just pointed out how it could still happen in America, probably to shut down the next version of the Occupy movement before it can properly organize on Twitter. But that will not affect you, only a few "malcontents." To make you concerned enough to get off your lazy asses, I have to come up with a reason for you to be worried about yourself. Every problem has to be boiled down to your personal narrative, or it's not worthy of time on the ol' attention radar. "Can't hurt me? Hell, that's not even a blip."
And that's how your governments on both sides of the aisle have been flying under the radar for years, stripping your rights while you were watching TV or surfing on Facebook. Because even as they've taken rights away from people, you can't see how removing these rights from a few folks means we've all lost them. Until it happens to you, it doesn't count as a real travesty. Which means the vast majority of people ignoring these problems are sociopaths who still won't stop calling themselves the good guys.
So turn your head away from the minor protest over nothing, again. Ignore the people who aren't on Twitter today, and just keep pretending that these policies won't be used in your country to silence critics of your abusive class-based society. But of course, those people will be minorities anyway, not real people either. So if they go away, they weren't in your followers, and it doesn't affect you.
It's just another day in paradise, right?
