from Hacker News

Twitter succumbs to Erdoğan’s pressure, silences key voices on election eve

by b0sk on 5/13/23, 8:08 PM with 44 comments

• by mrtksn on 5/13/23, 10:11 PM

  Meanwhile, Turkey's oldest and most popular social media "Ekşi Sözlük" was blocked again today.

  Previously, the original domain eksisozluk.com was blocked and the reason given was "the site has unnaturally large number of critics". Once the appeals to the court failed, they switched to eksisozluk2023.com and it was fine for a while but tonight they blocked that domain too. Now the new domain is eksisozluk42.com

  An interesting fact is, the website is run by a legal entity registered in Turkey, with physical offices in central Istanbul. They are known to run the website by the book and removing any content the court demands but the core principle is "anything legal goes". So it's quite a free speech platform, despite some controversies over they years.

  It's ridiculous to have them blocked since they are %100 legal. The government literally just said "fuck it, just block it".

• by dotcoma on 5/13/23, 8:11 PM

  “free speech absolutist”.

  ROTFL

• by fwlr on 5/13/23, 9:46 PM

  Seems like the choice was between “Turkey blocks all of Twitter for all Turkish citizens” and “Twitter blocks certain tweets or accounts for all Turkish citizens”[1], and in addition Twitter will release information on what specifically the Turkish government requested to be blocked[2].

  I know Elon has endlessly declared himself a free speech absolutist, but to me this seems like a perfect test case of “free speech maximalist” vs “free speech absolutist” - in general, the maximalist preference is 100% > 99% > 98% > … > 1% > 0%, while the absolutist preference is 100% > 0% > 1-99%. If he thinks his decision here is obviously correct then he’s actually a maximalist, not an absolutist like he so often claimed.

  (Personally, I think this is a surprisingly sensible approach. I’ve long thought maximalism to be superior to absolutism, almost everywhere. In the case of free speech on the internet in particular, I take it as axiomatic that “The internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it”, and consider it an obvious corollary that minimizing the amount of damage results in the most efficient and rapid re-routing.)

  1: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1657422401754259461 2: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1657428707995181058

• by cbeach on 5/13/23, 8:53 PM

  Unfortunately in a country like Turkey, if Twitter doesn’t comply with the regime, the regime simply blocks Twitter for everyone in the country.

  Erdogan meddles (with only partial success, hopefully) or Erdogan blocks? What’s worse?

• by h2odragon on 5/13/23, 9:28 PM

  Which governments should Twitter obey, then?

• by nyagaga on 5/14/23, 9:09 AM

  After all there is a precedent, when Twitter decided to ban the former US President on its own account without any sort of court ruling mandating that. I don't agree with this move with regards to Turkey, but no one ever reflects on this?

• by rainytuesday on 5/13/23, 10:49 PM

  So just like the 2020 election, then? De-platform political opponents and mock them by saying "build you own platform, its a private company"?