Nigeria is having a bad spring. Rebel groups are active in at least three regions, including the southern areas where people tried in the 1960s to create the separate state of Biafra. A week ago, Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari tweeted this:
Many of those misbehaving today are too young to be aware of the destruction and loss of lives that occurred during the Nigerian Civil War. Those of us in the fields for 30 months, who went through the war, will treat them in the language they understand.
Twitter quickly deleted the post for violating its rules against fomenting violence.
Which makes me wonder; when you're the President of a country where rebels kill and kidnap your citizens every day, isn't threatening violence sometimes part of your job? Seems to me completely appropriate for the President to remind rebels and their supporters where their actions might lead.
Twitter is of course a private company free to decide for themselves what messages they will ban, but this decision still seems very odd to me. Threats are part of the normal language of diplomacy. The President is known to be in contact with political leaders in the south, figuring out how to deal with rebels and work on the people's grievances. Who is Twitter to decide what threats are not acceptable in that situation?
The President responded by banning Twitter. Commentators say the removal of his tweet was just a pretext, and that he has wanted to do this for some time because political separatists are using Twitter to organize their movements. Which means that Twitter allows political grievances to be aired, so long as they don't openly threaten violence, even if they point much more directly toward civil war than anything the president said.
Very strange.
And let me take this opportunity to wonder about Nigeria. By some metrics Nigeria is thriving. The economy is growing, inflation is under control, and the country's arts scene is one of the most vibrant in the world. Whatever art interests you, from film to abstract painting to traditional sculpture to every sort of music, Nigerians are making tons of it. They have a democratic government and a rambunctious press. And yet they have terrible problems as well: corruption on a gigantic scale, criminal violence, terrorism, political turmoil. How do these things coexist?
I suppose it is an old story; from Renaissance Italy to Southern Song China, the most artistically creative periods have often been eras of violence and turmoil. But I still find it very confusing.
"Twitter is of course a private company free to decide for themselves what messages they will ban, but this decision still seems very odd to me. Threats are part of the normal language of diplomacy. The President is known to be in contact with political leaders in the south, figuring out how to deal with rebels and work on the people's grievances. Who is Twitter to decide what threats are not acceptable in that situation?"
ReplyDeleteYou already answered your own question - they're a private company.
If you invited someone into your home, and told them the rules of the house, and then they broke those rules, and you asked them to leave, it would not be remotely reasonable for anyone at all to ask, "Who are you to decide if a guest's behavior is acceptable or not"? It's your house! You're literally the only person who gets to decide what is acceptable in it or not!
It doesn't matter one iota if anyone else agrees with the rules you set down. It doesn't matter if those rules are wholly absurd to them, such as you requiring all guests in your home to hop on one leg at all times and only speak in rhyming French couplets. Your house, your rules, and no one has any right to complain - they just have the right to not avail themselves of the benefits of your home and leave.
"The President responded by banning Twitter. Commentators say the removal of his tweet was just a pretext, and that he has wanted to do this for some time because political separatists are using Twitter to organize their movements. Which means that Twitter allows political grievances to be aired, so long as they don't openly threaten violence, even if they point much more directly toward civil war than anything the president said."
I'm not understanding your logic here. Twitter is acting fundamentally like any other communications service.
If you send a letter in the mail to your political fellows in which you seek to organize a rally, demonstration, etc, that's normal and acceptable. But if you send a letter that encourages a riot, or an assassination, etc, that's no longer simple exercising of free speech, that's conspiracy to commit a criminal act, and if it gets found out, the letter can be used as evidence against you.
A difference between letters and social media is that letters sent via the USPS don't have their contents looked at automatically, whereas the digital contents of most social media messages are inherently public. And public speech receives public censure, and as well as governmental scrutiny. If you use Twitter to plan an assassination, you are publicly conspiring to commit a criminal act - and Twitter, if they allow such things, could easily be argued to an accessory to that crime.
Hence why virtually no social media outlet on the internet allows for calls for violence - it's risking legal suicide. Calls for violence are not protected Free Speech, and companies who offer a platform to potentially criminal speech have to cover their own asses in case things end up in court.
Imagine if the USPS somehow magically and fundamentally KNEW the contents of every letter that was sent via its services - would we, as a society, tolerate them knowingly delivering letters which openly threaten violence? No, of course not. There would be lawsuits brought against the government immediately. The only reason that anyone ever gets away with sending such things via the USPS is that the Post Office has no realistic way of knowing such things are being sent.
Given the right of private companies and their right to decide for themselves what messages they will ban, I think the Twitter action seems perfectly reasonable. If I were Twitter, I wouldn't want my name to start getting wrapped up in a lot of political violence around the world. Do you want history books about the Nigerian Civil War of 2021-23 to have an entry for "Twitter" in the index? Do you want Twitter to appear in the bibliography?
ReplyDeleteIt seems to me this is all part of the (I think salutary and overdue) loss of innocence about the political role of social media. Social media was taken as a great force for liberation back when it seemed all about bringing unarmed young people together to bring down unpopular, obviously superannuated geezers like Mubarak. But most political conflict isn't like that. Most isn't the big baddies vs. the people, but groups in conflict who all think of themselves as the (or a) people. Twitter doesn't want to get stuck in the middle of something like that.
There may also be an issue of consistency. They banned Trump for inciting violence (and I'm absolutely delighted with that), and they don't want to be called out for allowing African leaders to incite violence but not Americans.