Government censorship of the Internet is a cat-and-mouse game, and despite more aggressive tactics in recent months, the cats have been largely frustrated while the mice wriggle away.
However, this year, the challenges for Silicon Valley are set to mount, with Russia and Turkey in particular trying to tighten controls on foreign-based Internet companies. Major US companies like Facebook, Twitter and Google are increasingly being put in the tricky position of figuring out which laws and orders to comply with around the world — and which to ignore or contest.
On Wednesday last week, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed the latest version of a personal data law that requires companies to store data about Russian users on computers inside the nation, where it is easier for the government to get access to it. With few companies expected to comply with the law, which goes into effect on Sept. 1, a confrontation might well erupt.
Illustration: Yusha
The clumsiness of current censorship efforts was apparent in mid-December, when Russia’s Internet regulator demanded that Facebook remove a page that was promoting an anti-government rally. After Facebook blocked the page for its 10 million or so Russian users, dozens of copycat pages popped up and the word spread on other social networks like Twitter. That created even more publicity for the event, scheduled for Thursday next week, intended to protest the sentencing of leading opposition figure Aleksei Navalny.
Prominent Russian blogger Anton Nosik, whose work has been censored by regulators, said it was absurd for a government to think it could easily stamp out an article or video when it can be copied or found elsewhere with a few clicks.
“The reader wants to see what he was prevented from seeing,” Nosik said in an interview. “All that blocking does not work.”
Instead, that prompted the government to switch tactics, moving Navalny’s sentencing to Tuesday last week with little notice in an attempt to diminish protests.
The Turkish government faced similar embarrassment when it tried to stop the dissemination of leaked documents and audio recordings on Twitter in March. Then-Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan — who is now Turkish president — ordered the shutdown of Twitter within Turkey after the company refused to block the posts, which implicated government officials in a corruption investigation.
Not only did the government lose a court fight on the issue, but while Twitter was blocked, legions of Turkish users also taught one another technical tricks to evade the ban, even spray-painting the instructions on the walls of buildings.
“We all became hackers and we all got on Twitter,” Istanbul Bilgi University professor of communication Asli Tunc said in a phone interview.
Despite such victories for free speech advocates, governments around the world are stepping up their efforts to control the Internet, escalating the confrontation.
“The trend lines are consistent,” Twitter global vice president of public policy Colin Crowell said in a phone interview. “There are more and more requests for removal of information.”
For example, Pakistan bombarded Facebook with nearly 1,800 requests to take down content in the first half of last year, according to the company’s most recent transparency report. Google’s YouTube video service has long been blocked in Pakistan, and the government briefly succeeded in getting Twitter to block certain “blasphemous” or “unethical” tweets last year until the company re-examined Pakistani law and determined the requests did not meet legal requirements.
Free speech activists view Facebook, the world’s largest social network, with 1.35 billion monthly users, as the company most inclined to work with governments and do whatever is necessary to keep its service up and running.
In spring last year, while Twitter was blocked in Turkey and YouTube was shut down, Facebook removed contested content and continued to operate. It has a dedicated team of outside lawyers who field censorship requests from the Turkish government and then recommend to corporate officials whether content should be blocked.
“Facebook can be quite important to the people who use it, so we try to make sure it remains accessible,” a company spokesman said. “We aggressively push back on unlawful or overly broad government requests.”
Twitter, which has about 284 million monthly users, styles itself as the world’s town square and a global champion of free speech, conforming to the letter of censorship laws while winking at workaround strategies, such as users changing the location listed on their profile to evade specific blocks that apply in a particular nation.
For Turkey’s opposition movement, Twitter “basically created an opening, a refreshing alternative, especially during the protests, and they know that. They act like a defender of freedom,” Tunc said.
As the biggest player, Google, whose YouTube service seems to draw the particular ire of foreign governments, has been forced into fights on many fronts. It is still viewed by many as a hero for its decision to pull out of China in 2010 rather than continue to censor search results there.
The company explained its philosophy at that time: “We have a bias in favor of people’s right to free expression. We are driven by a belief that more information means more choice, more freedom and ultimately more power for the individual.”
While China remains a thorn in the side of most Western Internet companies — Facebook and Twitter are basically blocked there — Russia is the current flash point in the censorship wars.
Over the summer last year, the Russian government began demanding that anyone with at least 3,000 daily visitors follow rules similar to those applying to a media company and face content restrictions. So far, Twitter and Facebook are simply passing those requests along to their users without making sure anyone complies. Many do not, but so far the Russian government has not pressed the issue.
However, the pressure might intensify later this year. Starting on Sept. 1, foreign technology companies are supposed to store data about Russian users on computers located in Russia and make a software key available to the government that could be used to unscramble and monitor private Internet communications.
That would give the government leverage in showdowns with tech companies, since it could simply raid the facility or arrest local employees.
Most Western technology companies have no data centers in Russia and no plans to change that.
“Our data centers are all in the United States,” Crowell said. “It’s unlikely that our first data center outside the United States will be in Russia.”
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