I feel it's kind of telling here that the opinion piece doesn't give even a single actual example of something Twitter is, specifically, doing wrong in regards to India.
Govt responded via press release to the drama twitter was enacting.This was one of the key slap downs
"Twitter Inc., a USA based private company, in its communique says that it seeks "constructive dialogue", "collaborative approach" from the government of a sovereign democratic republic to "safeguard interests of the public". It is time that Twitter disabuses itself of this grandiosity and comply with the laws of India."
- A embarrassing "strategy" document came out in the public domain that was attributed to the main opposition party. The doc might or might not be true.
- A govt minister of the ruling party tweeted it
- The opposition party wrote to Twitter claiming the document is fake and the Tweet should be flagged.
- Twitter intervened and flagged the tweet by the minister as referring to manipulated media.
Two questions:
- Why does Twitter get to mediate and be judge/jury/enforce on a political feud between two parties in a sovereign nation
- Twitter has let many tweets stand in the past referring to demonstrably false documents so there is a very overt demonstration of bias. The opposition party is a leftist party which has failed to win any general elections.
What is wrong with the Internet is that governments around the world let commercial web sites (.com) operate freely in a network that was created for free dissemination of information. Why in the world would one let commercial businesses from another country operate freely on an information platform that your country maintains, that is beyond my comprehension, but web companies have pulled that off.
The article doesn't offer any examples which makes it hard to really understand what issue the author is arguing about beyond vague generalities.
> In the name of freedom, an equally venal, arbitrary and rapacious foreign corporation is effectively waging war against the Indian state, all wrapped up in the garb of “freedom of expression”.
It feels like there's some additional context not present in the article itself that the audience is assumed to have.
Perhaps Twitter is acting undemocratically in India, but the article doesn't make a good case for that on its own.
(Also, somewhat ironically when trying to copy and paste the snippet above, the website offers a post-to-twitter overlay/button as soon as you select some text)
I'm going to hazard a guess that the author is a supporter of the BJP/Narendra Modi and that Twitter is not being as accommodating as Facebook has been in accommodating that party's political objectives.
In political communications and propaganda (from the Italian word for propagation, eg of an idea), facts are not as important as the feeling that is communicated to the reader. You see this a lot in tabloid media where headline writers will tell readers what emotion they can expect to get from a story, eg 'Outrageous: minor annoyance is symbolic of general grievance.' It's worth bearing in mind that hormones are like drugs and people can get addicted to being angry or depressed just as much as they to feeling good, so people often read the news selectively in order to get a fix of their preferred emotion.
Another thing that's important in political communication is posture. Again this need not be based on facts, but is about framing the discussion a certain way. The best way I have found to explain this is to suggest you watch scenes from an unfamiliar movie in a different language with no subtitles, or in your own language with the sound turned down. You don't need to know the plot or the content of the film in order to get a sense of which characters are in adversarial or cooperative relationships, or which character has 'won' a scene.
Narrative filmmaking is full of little tricks, from camera angle to lighting to framing to music to help you feel your way through a scene without too much intellectualization. It's much more work to watch a film with no music, or to maintain focus on the story just by reading a script or listening to actors reading it at a table, unless you are already a fan of the film.
This article is an example of the same thing. Most HN readers are in the west and are not familiar with the political and cultural mores in India. But many of those tropes will be immediately and even unconsciously familiar to the target audience, and the writer's goal is to use those to present Twitter in a certain role that will incrementally reshape public perceptions.
Of course, I am not sufficiently knowledgeable about Indian politics to understand all the factors in play, but I suggest that they're not all that different from this extant in the American political context of recent years.
Because there is nothing wrong with twitter. Few weeks back they dared to point out that one of the tweet by a government employee was fake. He photoshopped an official document and the opposition found out it was fake. Twitter labelled his tweet as unauthentic and this ruling gangster party wants to ban twitter.
The rest of the media, like this post, have been bought out.
In more ways than one, modi is much much worse than his Chinese counterpart.
I was expecting to disagree with this, but it brought me around by the end of it. It's an opinion piece only, but certainly relevant to pretty much every country, not just India.
How did it bring you around? This piece doesn't even contain any concrete accusations. The headline claims that Twitter is waging war on India...somehow, and the rest of the article just assumes this is a) a meaningful claim, and b) true. The actual body of the article just goes through various ways of saying "this is bad," without actually going into any specifics of what Twitter is supposedly doing (are they shooting missiles at India?), or why those specific things are bad. So I'm having a hard time seeing how anyone could go into this article disagreeing with the headline and come out convinced.
I thought it was going to be about something specific and pretty, it was actually more general about the amount of control social media has over what people see. That's all, I don't think it was very deep or contained evidence to support it, just an opinion that was different from what I thought the headline said. Probably wasn't worth me posting about.
This is a shallow nonsensical article set to the whims of the ruling dystopian political party.
Couple of weeks ago members of the ruling party , BJP, put up fake documents on Twitter with fake symbols of opposition party. Twitter labelled the tweets as unauthentic.
The ruling party went primal on twitter. Modi and his parties are everything that an absolute dictatorship would be. I still remember how they set the police to assault journalists in Gujarat when the media questioned his role in the Gujarat genocide.
The ruling government will stop at nothing to be in power. The previous Gujarat massacre, the current pandemic fiasco.. they don't care. Anyone that questions them is labelled as antinational and is considered traitor.
They jailed a 19 year old girl who protested climate change. Imagine US jailing Greta..
And shill opinion pieces like these just plays into his goal of total control.
