Tech billionaires want to regulate themselves. What could go wrong?
Turkey’s presidential race will go to a runoff, but control over Turkey’s internet clearly belongs to Erdogan. This past weekend, as Turks prepared to cast their ballots, the government appealed to Twitter to censor several hundred accounts that weren’t to its liking. Those with the biggest followings on the list belong to vocal critics of Erdogan and the ruling Justice and Development Party and to journalists like Cevheri Guven, who reports and opines on Turkish politics from exile. Travis Brown is maintaining a list of restricted accounts on GitHub.
Just like it did in India in March, Twitter complied with these requests and suspended a raft of accounts within Turkey, without missing a beat. Elon deflected critics by arguing that Twitter would have been shut down in Turkey if the company hadn’t complied. I guess he didn’t have time to think about alternatives. Yaman Akdeniz, a veteran tech and law expert from Turkey who I spoke with for this newsletter a few weeks back, tweeted that “companies like Twitter should resist the removal orders, legally challenge them and fight back strategically against any pressure from the Turkish authorities.” Indeed, prior to Musk, Twitter was not afraid to challenge these kinds of demands. But these are different times. I shudder to think what it portends for future elections everywhere.
Former Human Rights Watch head Kenneth Roth summed it up well: “Elon Musk just gave away the store,” he tweeted. “By making clear that he prioritizes Twitter's presence in a country over the platform's free-speech principles, he has invited endless censorship demands.” Indeed, if other states see Twitter honoring these kinds of requests, what will stop them from pursuing the same tactics?
People are back online in Pakistan, but the country remains on edge following last week’s arrest of former Prime Minister Imran Khan, which triggered nationwide protests and street violence. In what they said was an effort to restore public order, authorities imposed a wave of network and social media shutdowns. But the chaos continued, and the shutdowns left people unable to communicate or follow the news. Pakistani digital rights expert Hija Kamran told Coda this week that “there is no evidence we can point to anywhere in the world that shows that shutdowns help to restore security.” She’s right. Researcher Jan Rydzak has even shown evidence that shutdowns tend to correlate with — and can even exacerbate — outbursts of violence and social unrest. They’re also really bad for the economy. Total cost estimates for this recent wave of shutdowns vary, but they are on the order of millions of dollars per day.