Although the SOPA legislation has been derailed for now, there are still some curious things happening on the net. Yesterday, social networking gurus Twitter released a very interesting blog post. In it they state that, “Starting today, we give ourselves the ability to reactively withhold content from users in a specific country — while keeping it available in the rest of the world.” The use of the word reactively is significant.
It seems that even an entire organization these days can react as impulsively and hastily as an individual when it comes to electronic communication. This shouldn’t be surprising since any group is a collective of its parts. What is surprising, however, is that a company like Twitter would be so open to what amounts to censorship when the very nature of the service it provides is dynamic and at times unpredictably volatile.
They of course go on to say that they have not as of yet exercised this ‘right’ to withhold but have made it public that they are likely to do so if the occasion calls for it. They point out this is in part a reaction to countries banning their service entirely or in partiality (Germany and France, for example, ban all pro-Nazi material). Twitter explains that previously, the only way to ensure that certain content would not appear was to ban it completely, globally. This new measure will give them the ability to target specific individuals.
Twitter clarifies that users will be notified in the event that content is withheld. They will also be told why. But in essence, this kind of action is in the realm of what in legal circles is referred to as a chilling effect, which is the discouragement of the expression of a constitutional right by threat of legal action. Twitter would surely and emphatically declare that they would never exercise this new policy in such a manner. This of course is a similar position that the crafters of the SOPA legislation took. They are out to protect us, right? This, we hope.
In the same blog post, Twitter provides a link to their ongoing partnership with Chilling Effects, a collaborative archive that was created to protect lawful online activity from legal action. On the Chilling Effects site, you can see cease and desist orders against Twitter from corporate heavy weights like Universal and Simon and Shuster.
Yesterday, we reported about the FBI’s plan to develop an application that will be able to cull information from social networking sites, like Twitter, in an effort to provide a kind of “early warning system.” This is no joke. From the spread of uprisings in the Middle East this past year to the Occupy Wall Street movement on this content, the power of social media is becoming abundantly clear to the general public, the government, and the private sector alike. Everyone has a vested interest in using these new networking tools. And we’re all just figuring out how best to use them.
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