Las decisiones corporativas de censura

En meses pasados, Twitter atendió una solicitud del gobierno alemán para "banear" del servicio a usuarios que publicaban contenidos nazis o revisionistas. No solo los gobiernos, entonces, se ven presionados a atender demandas políticas.

Hasta la fecha, en el marco del conflicto que viven Palestinos e Israelíes (hoy en tregua), no se ha pronunciado sobre el activo uso de redes sociales por parte de los grupos armados oficiales de los dos campos: Hamas y la Fuerza de Defensa Israelí.

" One of the most obvious examples of this occurred very early in the attack, when the Israeli Defence Forces’ official Twitter account posted a tweet that warned Hamas leaders not to “show their faces above ground,” because the army was about to launch missiles into their area of the Gaza Strip. This arguably qualifies as a direct and specific threat of violence, which is against Twitter’s terms of service—but so far the tweet remains, and the IDF account has not been sanctioned (there were some reports that it had been suspended, but those appeared to involve another, unrelated account). In fact, the IDF account is marked as officially “verified” by Twitter.

So far, Twitter hasn’t responded to a request for comment on how it is handling the Israeli conflict and the fact that it is playing out live on the network—complete with photos of rocket attacks, burned-out buildings, and even dead bodies (I’ll update this post if and when Twitter responds). The company has often spoken of its responsibility as the “free-speech wing of the free-speech party,” but for the most part that has involved promoting the rights of individual users in the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street protests, not the interests of governments and armies.

Arguably, Israel would be well within its rights to ask Twitter to remove or censor tweets by Hamas, which is defined by the Israeli government as a terrorist organization. If Twitter has selectively censored tweets by Nazi sympathizers after a request from the German government—using the new powers it introduced earlier this year—how would it justify not giving Israel the same ability to block Hamas tweets or filter them based on certain geographical limits?" Ver más en Israel, Twitter, and the Line Between Free Speech and Violence - Businessweek