Global Voices Advocacy » France

What Does Twitter’s Country-by-Country Takedown System Mean for Freedom of Expression?

Eva Galperin — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 02:05:31 +0000

This post was originally published on the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Deeplinks blog.

Yesterday, Twitter announced in a blog post that it was launching a system that would allow the company to take down content on a country-by-country basis, as opposed to taking it down across the Twitter system. The Internet immediately exploded with allegations of censorship, conspiracy theories about Twitter’s Saudi investors and automated content filtering, and calls for a January 28 protest. One thing is clear: there is widespread confusion over Twitter's new policy and what its implications are for freedom of expression all over the world.

Let’s get one thing out of the way: Twitter already takes down some tweets and has done so for years. All of the other commercial platforms that we're aware of remove content, at a minimum, in response to valid court orders. Twitter removes some tweets because they are deemed to be abuse or spam, while others are removed in compliance with court orders or DMCA notifications. Until now, when Twitter has taken down content, it has had to do so globally. So for example, if Twitter had received a court order to take down a tweet that is defamatory to Ataturk–which is illegal under Turkish law–the only way it could comply would be to take it down for everybody. Now Twitter has the capability to take down the tweet for people with IP addresses that indicate that they are in Turkey and leave it up everywhere else. Right now, we can expect Twitter to comply with court orders from countries where they have offices and employees, a list that includes the United Kingdom, Ireland, Japan, and soon Germany.

Twitter's increasing need to remove content comes as a byproduct of its growth into new countries, with different laws that they must follow or risk that their local employees will be arrested or held in contempt, or similar sanctions. By opening offices and moving employees into other countries, Twitter increases the risks to its commitment to freedom of expression. Like all companies (and all people) Twitter is bound by the laws of the countries in which it operates, which results both in more laws to comply with and also laws that inevitably contradict one another. Twitter could have reduced its need to be the instrument of government censorship by keeping its assets and personnel within the borders of the United States, where legal protections exist like CDA 230 and the DMCA safe harbors (which do require takedowns but also give a path, albeit a lousy one, for republication).

Twitter is trying to mitigate these problems by only taking down access to content for people coming from IP addresses the country seeking to censor that content. That's good. For now, the overall effect is less censorship rather than more censorship, since they used to take things down for all users. But people have voiced concerns that “if you build it, they will come,”–if you build a tool for state-by-state censorship, states will start to use it. We should remain vigilant against this outcome.

In the meantime, Twitter is taking two additional steps to ensure that users know that the censorship has happened. First, they are giving users notice when they seek that content. Second, they are sending the notices they receive to the Chilling Effects Project, which publishes the orders, creating an archive. Note: EFF is one of the partners in the Chilling Effects project. So far, of very big websites only Google and Wikipedia are this transparent about what they take down or block and why. When Facebook takes down a post, there is no public accountability at all. Through Chilling Effects, users can track exactly what kinds of content Twitter is being asked to censor or take down and how that happened.

So what should Twitter users do? Keep Twitter honest. First, pay attention to the notices that Twitter sends and to the archive being created on Chilling Effects. If Twitter starts honoring court orders from India to take down tweets that are offensive to the Hindu gods, or tweets that criticize the king in Thailand, we want to know immediately. Furthermore, transparency projects such as Chilling Effects allow activists to track censorship all over the world, which is the first step to putting pressure on countries to stand up for freedom of expression and put a stop to government censorship.

What else? Circumvent censorship. Twitter has not yet blocked a tweet using this new system, but when it does, that tweet will not simply disappear—there will be a message informing you that content has been blocked due to your geographical location. Fortunately, your geographical location is easy to change on the Internet. You can use a proxy or a Tor exit node located in another country. Read Write Web also suggests that you can circumvent per-country censorship by simply changing the country listed in your profile.

France: ‘3 Strikes' Internet piracy law defeated in parliament

Tal Pavel — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 10:41:05 +0000

France's parliament rejected Hadopi (la Haute Autorité pour la diffusion des œuvres et la protection des droits sur internet) bill on Thursday (09.04.2009) with the ruling UMP party failure (21-15) to approve the law.

The law proposed two warnings and then, after a third violation, disconnection from the Internet for up to a year of Internet users caught illegally downloading files (music or films).

The bill was passed by both houses, and all that remained was for them each to ratify the final text, but “15 Socialists were hanging about in the hallway, charging in at the last minute to cast their votes and defeat the law”.

The music and movie industries push governments and internet service providers to terminate or suspend service of peer-to-peer file sharers since it hurt the revenues of artists and production companies, but the Failure came after similar rejections in the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Germany and even the European Parliament.

In their part, Sarkozy said he was determined to see the law passed and accused the opposition of parliamentary maneuvering.

The Culture Minister plans to bring the bill back on April 27.

The International Federation for the Phonographic Industry and the worldwide counterpart to the RIAA, said it would continue lobbying for the French three-strikes law.

March of the censors: France, Turkey and China clamp down on freedom of speech

Sami Ben Gharbia — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 23:34:03 +0000

Two weeks ago, the French blog AgoraVox, one of the leading European citizen media blogs, warned against what it termed the gradual “berlusconisation” of the French media and the threat posed by the rise of Nicolas Sarkozy, French Minister of the Interior and conservative party head, to freedom of speech in the country.

Yesterday, France’s Constitutional Council passed the Sarkozy law [Fr] ( Loi sur la prévention de la délinquance - Law on the prevention of criminality), which criminalizes the filming or broadcasting of acts of violence by people other than professional journalists. During the parliamentary debate, government representatives said the law is meant to target a practice known as “happy slapping”, defined in Wikipedia as “a fad in which an unsuspecting victim is attacked while an accomplice records the assault (commonly with a camera phone or a smartphone).”

In France, therefore, the filming and broadcasting of acts of violence such as the riots which took place in the Paris suburbs during the month of October and November, 2005, will henceforth be the prerogative of accredited journalists only. Under this new law, any other eyewitness who records acts of violence, or anyone who makes the content available online (the operator of a web site, for instance) could face up to five years' imprisonment and a fine of nearly US$100,000.

In an ironic twist, the law was announced on March 3, 2007, exactly 16 years after amateur videographer George Holliday filmed African-American Rodney King being beaten by Los Angeles police officers (see the video on YouTube). The officers' eventual acquittal in 1992 sparked off riots in the city.

Bientôt la Corée du Nord sera un paradis de liberté comparé au camp de concentration à ciel ouvert du Frankistan.

North Korea will be soon a paradise of freedom compared with the open sky concentration camp of Frankistan”

said Doug on his blog.

“Whipping out your phone and recording footage of someone setting a car on fire - or getting pummelled by police for that matter - could subject you to a five-year prison term and nearly $100,000 in fines,” noted Andy Carvin yesterday.

So “If you’re reporting in France, you’d better get yourself an official press pass”, said David Kaplan.

One has to wonder now what the next move by the French Republic, in its fervor to “prevent criminal behavior”, will be. Will it be the banning of video-sharing sites like YouTube and the France's Dailymotion, which were widely used by young citizen journalists during the “émeutes de Paris” (Paris riots) two years ago? And will music videos like “Paris Brûle” (”Paris Is Burning” — seen below) be forbidden in France?

Yet it seems like France is not the only country having trouble coming to terms with the tools and trappings of modern technology and the explosion in video-sharing that is empowering citizen journalists. Last year, Jack Straw, the UK's former home secretary, openly supported a plan to impose controls on YouTube: “There is a very serious issue how such videos should better be controlled,” he said.

And just yesterday, word came from Turkey that the country's largest telecommunications services provider, Turk Telekom, blocked access to YouTube, following a court decision deeming that videos appearing on the site were insulting to the father of modern Turkey, Kemal Atatürk, and to the Turkish people. The ban was imposed despite the fact that the video was removed from the site ahead of the court’s decision.

“We are not in the position of saying that what YouTube did was an insult, that it was right or wrong,” Paul Doany, the head of Turk Telekom, is quoted as saying. Users of the country's leading ISP, found this message when they tried to access YouTube: “Access to www.youtube.com site has been suspended in accordance with decision no: 2007/384 dated 06.03.2007 of Istanbul First Criminal Peace Court.”

“I’m very sorry that my country will cause such a bad reputation by these censorships, but we are happy to fight against them. I’m running a blog network (the largest and the only one) in Turkey. We are starting a campaign and going to write against these censorships in our blogs until they correct this huge mistake,” said Mert Maviş.

According to Reuters, however, the Istanbul court issued a second ruling lifting the block after YouTube removed the video from its service.

On another continent, in China this time, the online diary and blogging platform Livejournal seems to have been blocked.

“Users who are wondering if the block is on our end can be told “no, we still love you; take it up with your ISP if you have further questions””, said an announcement on the Livejournal community forum.

In an interview with Wired reporter Quinn Norton, the Chinese dissident and founder of China Digital Times Xiao Qiang said that “It could be one of the blogs in Livejournal has the content they want to block.”

Norton's article notes that SixApart — the company that owns Livejournal — claims that China has blocked “roughly 1.8 million of its blogs,” and that it is not the first time that the Chinese government has blocked Livejournal. They did it in March 2004 and again in June 2005. As Xiao Qiang says, “You never know when they are going to block it again.”