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Alexey Navalny, the opposition leader whom the Russian secret police nearly killed with military-grade poison last year, is worried about Twitters decision to shut down Donald Trumps account. Navalny is no Trump fan; he is far to the left of the outgoing U.S. president. The reason he is worried is that the way U.S. tech has ganged up on Trump and his most radical supporters can lead to his own deplatforming in Russia, where he has no access to state-controlled media and relies on mostly U.S.-based social networks YouTube, Facebook, Twitter to spread his message. Thats a valid concern.

Navalny laid out his logic in an English-language Twitter thread. In my opinion, the decision to ban Trump was based on emotions and personal political preferences, he wrote. Dont tell me he was banned for violating Twitter rules. I get death threats here every day for many years, and Twitter doesnt ban anyone (not that I ask for it).

He added: Of course, Twitter is a private company, but we have seen many examples in Russian and China of such private companies becoming the states best friends and enablers when it comes to censorship. And, This precedent will be exploited by the enemies of freedom of speech around the world. In Russia as well. Every time when they need to silence someone, they will say: this is just common practice, even Trump got blocked on Twitter.

I cant say I was surprised to see American commentators jump in with condescending retorts telling Navalny that he doesnt get it, that he doesnt understand the importance of cracking down on insurrection or the right of private companies to police their platforms. The thing is, he nearly died defending Russians right to protest, and, as a corruption fighter, hes spent more than a decade delving into the shadowy relationships between private companies and the state. If he hasnt earned the right to be heard as an expert on such matters, I dont know who has.

The private company argument simply doesnt fly. Twitter and Facebook have tolerated Trump and his fans in all their glory calls for journalists to be murdered, racist bile, direct threats throughout the Trump presidency. Even if they said they didnt, the stuff was impossible to miss as a user of the social platforms. Apple, Google and Amazon allowed the censorship-free platform Parler, frequented by the far right, to grow using their services until two things happened: last weeks Capitol riot and the Georgia Senate elections that handed the Democrats full political control of the U.S.

I dont know which of the two was the actual deciding factor in the tech giants Trump crackdown. But look at it from the point of view of someone fighting an authoritarian regime in Russia, Turkey, Belarus or elsewhere. What youll see is the U.S. president-elect declaring protesters who broke into a government building domestic terrorists and an immediate response from the tech companies, which fall all over themselves trying to prove they arent providing terrorists with a platform. Are they suddenly outraged because a Democratic administration, in control of the House and Senate, can quickly regulate them in all kinds of painful ways? Seen from Russia, or Turkey or China, where concerns about politically motivated regulatory moves by single-party governments are top of mind for every business owner, this picture is familiar.

One could argue that even if U.S.-based tech platforms have rushed to align themselves with the political winners in their country to avoid a costly confrontation, they wont do the same for Russian President Vladimir Putin or his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Its more complicated than that.

On paper, authoritarian regimes terrorism and insurrection laws are similar to those of the U.S. Now, the regimes have cover to demand from the U.S. networks that they ban Russian, Turkish, Belarussian domestic terrorists on the same grounds as the ones used against Trump and Trumpists inciting aggressive, violent protest. And if the platforms refuse, they will be accused of double standards, declared tools of the U.S. government and themselves harassed and possibly banned. That one-two combination wasnt possible before, because even authoritarians these days have to pay lip service to freedom of speech; what the platforms have done takes that concern out of the equation. Russian propagandists such as Margarita Simonyan, head of the RT channel, have long waited for such a golden opportunity to agitate for retaliation against U.S. platforms, ever since they started flagging content from Russian government-funded media.

Where would a Facebook, Twitter and YouTube ban leave people like Navalny? Theyd be confined to any start-up platforms that emerge to pick up the slack, and to Telegram, the Dubai-based platform created by Russian libertarian Pavel Durov, which the Russian government tried to block but failed, as Telegram fought back by ingenious technical means. But even for Telegram, which isnt U.S.-based, running uncensored content is dangerous these days like Parler, it could be thrown out of app stores, for example (although Telegram has been working on a full-featured mobile browser-based version for just such an eventuality).

The U.S. tech platforms, of course, werent set up to enable political opposition to authoritarian regimes. They are commercial enterprises that exist to make money by selling ads. Its probably a strategic mistake for any opposition figure in any country to put their eggs in this basket. But given the platforms oligopolistic nature, there hasnt been much choice.

In todays world, if a platform is to enable free speech, it needs to be technologically extraterritorial free from reliance on any providers sensitive to pressure from nation states. Both legally and financially, building such a platform is an enormous challenge. But then, I remember a time when authoritarian rulers failed despite banning private copy machines, let alone content platforms. Political opposition to flawed, unfree regimes will survive under any conditions, with or without Silicon Valley help; but it has likely suffered a setback. That, and not the unsuccessful riot at the Capitol, is the lasting gift to Putin. He wont fail to cash this check.

Leonid Bershidsky is a member of the Bloomberg News Automation team based in Berlin. He was previously Bloomberg Opinions Europe columnist. His Russian translation of George Orwells 1984 is due out in early 2021.

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Leonid Bershidsky: Tech censorship is the real gift to Putin - TwinCities.com-Pioneer Press

Last week, following riots that saw supporters of President Trump breach and sack parts of the Capitol building, Facebook and Twitter made the decision to give the president the boot. That was notable enough, given that both companies had previously treated the president, like other political leaders, as largely exempt from content moderation rules. Many of the presidents followers responded by moving to Parler. This week, the response has taken a new turn. Infrastructure companies much closer to the bottom of the technical stack including Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Googles Android and Apples iOS app storesdecided to cut off service not just to an individual but to an entire platform. Parler has so far struggled to return online, partly through errors of its own making, but also because the lower down the technical stack, the harder it is to find alternatives, or re-implement what capabilities the Internet has taken for granted.

Whatever you think of Parler, these decisions should give you pause. Private companies have strong legal rightsunder U.S. law to refuse to host or support speech they dont like. But that refusal carries different risks when a group of companies comes together to ensure that certain speech or speakers are effectively taken offline altogether.

To see the implications of censorship choices by deeper stack companies, lets back up for a minute. As researcher Joan Donovan puts it,At every level of the tech stack, corporations are placed in positions to make value judgments regarding the legitimacy of content, including who should have access, and when and how. And the decisions made by companies at varying layers of the stack are bound to have different impacts on free expression.

At the top of the stack are services like Facebook, Reddit, or Twitter, platforms whose decisions about who to serve (or what to allow) are comparatively visible, though still far too opaque to most users. Their responses can be comparatively targeted to specific users and content and, most importantly, do not cut off as many alternatives. For instance, a discussion forum lies close to the top of the stack: if you are booted from such a platform, there are other venues in which you can exercise your speech. These are the sites and services that all users (both content creators and content consumers) interact with most directly. They are also the places where people think of when they think of the content (i.e.I saw it on Facebook). Users are often required to have individual accounts or advantaged if they do. Users may also specifically seek out the sites for their content. The closer to the user end, the more likely it is that sites will have more developed and apparent curatorial and editorial policies and practicestheir "signature styles." And users typically have an avenue, flawed as it may be, to communicate directly with the service.

At the other end of the stack are internet service providers (ISPs), like Comcast or AT&T. Decisions made by companies at this layer of the stack to remove content or users raise greater concerns for free expression, especially when there are few if any competitors. For example, it would be very concerning if the only broadband provider in your area cut you off because they didnt like what you said onlineor what someone else whose name is on the account said. The adage if you dont like the rules, go elsewhere doesnt work when there is nowhere else to go.

In between are a wide array of intermediaries, such as upstream hosts like AWS, domain name registrars, certificate authorities (such as Lets Encrypt), content delivery networks (CDNs), payment processors, and email services. EFF has a handy chart of some of those key links between speakers and their audience here. These intermediaries provide the infrastructure for speech and commerce, but many have only the most tangential relationship to their users. Faced with a complaint, takedown will be much easier and cheaper than a nuanced analysis of a given users speech, much less the speech that might be hosted by a company that is a user of their services. So these service are more likely to simply cut a user or platform off than do a deeper review. Moreover, in many cases both speakers and audiences will not be aware of the identities of these services and, even if they are, have no independent relationship with them. These services are thus not commonly associated with the speech that passes through them and have no "signature style" to enforce.

We saw a particularly egregious example of an infrastructure takedown just a few months ago, when Zoom made the decision to block a San Francisco State University online academic event featuring prominent activists from Black and South African liberation movements, the advocacy group Jewish Voice for Peace, and controversial figure Leila Khaledinspiring Facebook and YouTube to follow suit. The decision, which Zoom justified on the basis of Khaleds alleged ties to a U.S.-designated foreign terrorist organization, was apparently made following external pressure.

Although we have numerous concerns with the manner in which social media platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter make decisions about speech, we viewed Zooms decision differently. Companies like Facebook and YouTube, for good or ill, include content moderation as part of the service they provide. Since the beginning of the pandemic in particular, however, Zoom has been used around the world more like a phone company than a platform. And just as you dont expect your phone company to start making decisions about who you can call, you dont expect your conferencing service to start making decisions about who can join your meeting.

Just as you dont expect your phone company to start making decisions about who you can call, you dont expect your conferencing service to start making decisions about who can join your meeting.

It is precisely this reason that Amazons ad-hoc decision to cut off hosting to social media alternative Parler, in the face of public pressure, should be of concern to anyone worried about how decisions about speech are made in the long run. In some ways, the ejection of Parler is neither a novel, nor a surprising development. Firstly, it is by no means the first instance of moderation at this level of the stack. Prior examples include Amazon denying service to WikiLeaks and the entire nation of Iran. Secondly, the domestic pressure on companies like Amazon to disentangle themselves from Parler was intense, and for good reason. After all, in the days leading up to its removal by Amazon, Parler played host to outrageously violent threats against elected politicians from its verified users, including lawyer L. Lin Wood.

But infrastructure takedowns nonetheless represent a significant departure from the expectations of most users. First, they are cumulative, since all speech on the Internet relies upon multiple infrastructure hosts. If users have to worry about satisfying not only their hosts terms and conditions but also those of every service in the chain from speaker to audienceeven though the actual speaker may not even be aware of all of those services or where they draw the line between hateful and non-hateful speechmany users will simply avoid sharing controversial opinions altogether. They are also less precise. In the past, weve seen entire large websites darkened by upstream hosts because of a complaint about a single document posted. More broadly, infrastructure level takedowns move us further toward a thoroughly locked-down, highly monitored web, from which a speaker can be effectively ejected at any time.

Going forward, we are likely to see more cases that look like Zooms censorship of an academic panel than we are Amazon cutting off another Parler. Nevertheless, Amazons decision highlights core questions of our time: Who should decide what is acceptable speech, and to what degree should companies at the infrastructure layer play a role in censorship?

At EFF, we think the answer is both simple and challenging: wherever possible, users should decide for themselves, and companies at the infrastructure layer should stay well out of it. The firmest, most consistent, approach infrastructure chokepoints can take is to simply refuse to be chokepoints at all. They should act to defend their role as a conduit, rather than a publisher. Just as law and custom developed a norm that we might sue a publisher for defamation, but not the owner of the building the publisher occupies, we are slowly developing norms about responsibility for content online. Companies like Zoom and Amazon have an opportunity to shape those normsfor the better or for the worse.

Its easy to say today, in a moment of crisis, that a service like Parler should be shunned. After all, people are using it to organize attacks on the U.S. Capitol and on Congressional leaders, with an expressed goal to undermine the democratic process. But when the crisis has passed, pressure on basic infrastructure, as a tactic, will be re-used, inevitably, against unjustly marginalized speakers and forums. This is not a slippery slope, nor a tentative predictionwe have already seen this happen to groups and communities that have far less power and resources than the President of the United States and the backers of his cause. And this facility for broad censorship will not be lost on foreign governments who wish to silence legitimate dissent either. Now that the world has been reminded that infrastructure can be commandeered to make decisions to control speech, calls for it will increase: and principled objections may fall to the wayside.

Over the coming weeks, we can expect to see more decisions like these from companies at all layers of the stack. Just today, Facebook removed members of the Ugandan government in advance of Tuesdays elections in the country, out of concerns for election manipulation. Some of the decisions that these companies make may be well-researched, while others will undoubtedly come as the result of external pressure and at the expense of marginalized groups.

The core problem remains: regardless of whether we agree with an individual decision, these decisions overall have not and will not be made democratically and in line with the requirements of transparency and due process, and instead are made by a handful of individuals, in a handful of companies, most distanced and least visible to the most Internet users. Whether you agree with those decisions or not, you will not be a part of them, nor be privy to their considerations. And unless we dismantle the increasingly centralized chokepoints in our global digital infrastructure, we can anticipate an escalating political battle between political factions and nation states to seize control of their powers.

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Beyond Platforms: Private Censorship, Parler, and the Stack - EFF

by: Rob Nelson, Nexstar Media Wire

CHICAGO (NewsNation Now) Snapchat is banning President Donald Trump, the latest in a line of suspensions and bans from the likes of YouTube, Facebook and Instagram.

The moves have ignited a debate over social media and censorship. NewsNation spoke with people on both sides of the issue.

MIT media professor Ethan Zuckerman said social media sites are within their rights to ban users who dont follow their policies.

That said, more broadly, Im not thrilled about this idea of how much control Facebook and Twitter have of anyones speech, said Zuckerman.

We also spoke with UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh about the social media de-platforming of President Trump.

He thinks private companies like Twitter have a right to ban users, but that banning an elected official with a large following may be an excessive use of their power.

Im not saying that Twitter violated its own policies. Its hard to tell because the process is not transparent. Its not like the courts where you have all these court records, Volokh said.

Both people NewsNation interviewed, while falling on different sides of the debate, still are seemingly in agreement on wondering if social media companies have too much influence in public discourse in America.

Watch the full conversation and a look at both sides of this issue in the player above.

President Donald Trump in his White House video on Wednesday night condemned the social media bans, calling them an assault on free speech. He said Americans should listen to each other, not silence each other.

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Both sides: The debate over social media and censorship - wreg.com