What now? Are they going to stop doing what they're doing? They now have another excuse to show their people how bad and anti-Chinese the West is.
Well no, the whole point of totalitarianism is that the people aren't even allowed a choice in the first place. A lot of people did speak out in Tiananmen Square and it didn't work out so well for them.
Russian later did succeed at overthrown their government with military support.
That said, I think there are other reasons to not like this; specifically while I appreciate some acknowledgment of the human rights issue, I don't especially like Twitter playing moderator for so much of the world's discourse--even if it correctly moderates a handful of high profile issues, it can still shape the enormous torrent of lower profile issues to its liking and deceptively point to those high profile cases when people challenge its neutrality. Consider for example how easy it would be for Twitter to turn a knob tomorrow and boost the amount of subtly pro-CCP content we see (or replace pro-CCP with whatever issue you don't think we should want more people exposed to). While yes, Twitter is a private entity and (in many western countries, anyway) they are legally free to moderate how they like, I still don't think it's a social good--I don't know that our various free speech laws considered the possibility that so much communication could be at the discretion of a single private entity (or even a small handful of private entities).
If they have rules against dehumanizing messages, it makes sense to enforce said rules. That the PRC is playing dumb about what they said isn't fooling anyone here.
Or now that the Trump administration has declared it a genocide, it could be tagged just as their tagged Trump's tweets.
My point is. I don't see how banning a foreign embassy from Twitter will solve anything.
I dunno, this seems like a pretty straightforward "how rules work" kind of situation.
So because somebody else limits freedom of speech, we should abandon our values and limit theirs?
>Do you think Twitter banning them is as bad as CCP concentration camps in Xinjiang?
Do you think Twitter banning them helps those interred in concentration camps?
Chinese people know Twitter is blocked but largely don't care because Weibo is more fun. Whether that's a good thing or bad thing is left as an exercise to the readers.
Ah yes. The grapes are sour anyway.
Social media companies are NOT publishers, therefore they are not responsible for what other publish. If they were like a newspaper they would be sued and out of business in matter of days after all the illegal stuff that it's being posted daily.
Read Section 230. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230
No, it's not.
> Newspapers are publishers, they choose what they publish and they are responsible for it.
Correct.
> Social media companies are NOT publishers, therefore they are not responsible for what other publish. If
Social media companies are publishers except for a defined subset of civil liability purposes; an exception (Section 230) which exists explicitly to avoid discouraging them from acting like publishers.
> Read Section 230.
I have. And I've read the arguments for it at the time it was adopted (both at the time and several times since.) Section 230 supports exactly the opposite position you are making: online media companies have exactly the editorial freedom of newspapers, plus (with regard to actions concerning user-generated rather than first-party-produced content) some liability immunities designed specifically to encourage them to take an editorial role rather than act as neutral unmoderated platforms.
The argument that they lose editorial freedom because of Section 230 (or would lose Section 230 protection as a result of exercising editorial freedom) contravenes both the text of and the very explicit motivation for Section 230.
If a regular person or company account tweeted a defense of genocide, their account would be censored. I believe this is the right move if we are not to apply double standards between regular people and government accounts on the platform.