In March 2021, a Turkish court ordered the Diken news site to remove a critical story about an ally of the country’s president, Recep Tayip Erdogan. Yaman Akdeniz, a Turkish lawyer and digital rights activist, posted a tweet urged his followers to read the story before the decree went into effect. Then the court ruled that his tweet should also be deleted. But for more than a year, Twitter has been defying the injunction, leaving the tweet standing.
If Elon Musk had owned Twitter back then, Adkeniz might have been unlucky. Although the company’s purchase by the SpaceX founder has been plagued with problems, it still looks like he’s poised to take over the platform. Despite his insistence that he will make Twitter a haven for free speech, Musk’s take on content moderation is compliance with local laws. “I prefer the laws of countries where Twitter operates,” he said tweeted on May 9. “If the citizens want something to be banned, pass a law to do it, otherwise it should be allowed.”
In the US, which has a very permissive definition of free speech protected by the First Amendment, Musk’s approach would force Twitter to allow all kinds of content that, as lawyers say, is “terrible but legal,” including overt racism and doxing. But protections for free speech are weaker in many other countries, including Turkey, India and Russia. A standard to allow only what is legally allowed would result in less freedom of speech on Twitter, not more.
In many countries, Twitter is rarely the most popular platform, but because of its function as a hub for activists, journalists and politicians, it “does its role in shaping public discourse above its weight,” said Prateek Waghre, internet policy director. Freedom Foundation in Delhi.
Twitter is currently doing that often comply with government requests to block or remove any material, especially if it violates the company’s terms of service. But the platform also often rejects takedown requests, as in the case of Akdeniz. Between January and July 2021, Twitter more than met the legal requirements 54 percent of the time, but the rate varies widely from country to country. In Russia, where Twitter answers only 8 percent of government takedown requests, the company refused to censor content related to the 2021 protests in support of opposition politician Alexei Navalny. This led to swift reprisals: Roskomnadzor, the government agency overseeing technology and communications, strangled the platform. (The government claimed this was because Twitter refused to remove content related to child exploitation and suicide, but it had already publicly threatened to punish social media companies for allowing content that encouraged people to protest.)
“In cases where they think a request doesn’t comply with a country’s local law or their own reading of the local law, they can push back and say they won’t comply,” said Freedom researcher Allie Funk House Director for Technology and Democracy. Companies can also look to documents such as Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which protects the right to free speech, said Jason Pielemeier, policy director of the Global Network Initiative. “This is a document that many countries in the world, not just the US, have apparently signed and agreed to,” he says. Twitter declined to comment in detail on its current approach to government requests.
All US-based social media companies must adhere to the rules that countries set to operate within their borders. But many countries have laws that allow governments to suppress vaguely defined categories of speech, making it easy to silence dissent and criticism. India’s new IT rules, for example, prohibit material that threatens ‘public order’ or decency. A regulation in Indonesia is also broad. “Twitter is one of the few places in Russia for free speech,” said Natalia Krapiva, technical legal advisor at Access Now. “In places like Russia, laws are deliberately broad and vague, meaning the government can choose how and when to enforce them.”
