Is it getting a bit cold in here?

The ultimate reality is we don't really have free speech.  Sure, we can chitter away but if we think we are blabbing without consequence, we are young, or naive, or both.  I am sure there are government bots scouring the interwebs for keywords that flag not only deranged but merely opinionated individuals as possible threats.  And I would guess that mentioning free speech in this blog might put me on somebody's list.  It doesn't bother me because I really have very little to hide.

But, apparently, Twitter has a lot to hide.  Or to filter.  The company has developed a system of filters that will censor Twitter posts to conform with any particular country's laws, one assumes to vouchsafe the company from legal action in said country just in case an irritating opinion on a touchy subject like, oh, child labour, happens to slip through:  http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/technology/tech-news/twitter-to-censor-tweets-in-individual-countries/article2316879/ .

This news piece brings up a few issues for me.  Of course, I find it deeply distasteful that speech would be censored.  'nough said.  But even on that issue, even if one feels that things should be censored, do ya really want Twitter in charge of that?  Huh?

If you've been living under a rock:  Twitter is an instant messaging service with over 300 million users worldwide as of 2011, handling over 300 million tweets per day.  It is the second most visited site on the planet right now and has revenues in the millions per year with a projection of over a billion users by 2013.  You can learn more over there at the Wikipedia.

Twitter has always filtered messages to comply with local laws but this is their first comprehensive solution to the problem of censorship worldwide.  They say they are doing it for us -- so that more tweets get out to more places and they are working closely with chillingeffects.org to make sure that we are updated on what country is demanding what censorship.  And they let you know that a Tweet has been censored.  It's nice of them, eh?

But I really have to wonder at how quickly Twitter complies.  Quickly.  Immediately.  Preemptively.  This should give us pause.  We must keep firmly in mind that companies are there to make money.  That is their imprimatur, as it were.  Nothing trumps that central goal including free speech and, with some companies, child labour and all manner of bad.  And even though the geeks fought back and stopped SOPA, it won't be long until the central issue on the interwebs is making money out of all these users.  It won't be the geeks but the lawyers running the internet. 

People are always surprised.  Over there at the Facebook, Mr. Mark Zuckerberg managed to compile the world's largest marketing database ever.  And we all did it willingly.  We all clicked 'like' happily.  I am sure Mr. Zuckerberg is giggling himself silly while he rolls around in his net worth of 17 million.  And just like Twitter, Facebook censors sites in order to comply with mores and laws.  And if Facebook is any indication of how the censorship will work with Twitter, Facebook commonly censors sites that include pictures of mothers breastfeeding (because showing a partial breast with a baby sucking is obscene), but commonly leave up advertisements that include topless models.

I would expect that even those sites that scream about sharing free information and went dark in protest against SOPA probably, already, censor their content in some way to avoid legal hassles.  Be sure that the interwebs are no longer the wild, wild, west.  Big Brother and all his little corporate toadies are not only watching, they are logging, recording your details, cooperating with investigations, passing judgement, and censoring.  And they are doing it faster than you can type 140 characters.

The central question is this:  Do their core values actually agree with yours?  Because, if they don't, you have little, if any, recourse.  It won't be initiatives like SOPA that change the internet.  Self-censorship already has.