Censorship and Privacy (Week 11)

 Part 1: Censorship

Actually, no. Really, what I want to talk about is not a case of censorship, despite often being portrayed as such. And this is not a one-off case either, this happens quite often when a public figure loses a platform because of something they did.

I want to talk about Trump's Twitter ban. On the face of it, it can look ugly. The President himself being silenced by a multinational corporation? Outrageous! This has to be a violation of the First Amendment, right?


Well, no. I am not a lawyer, but it must be said that the First Amendment only protects people and private entities from the government. So, for example, an American citizen may post (almost) anything online and the government cannot force them to delete the post or punish them for it. Also, the government cannot force a private entity to say something that entity does not believe in. So, let's say if a President (an agent of the government) demands that Twitter (a private company) reinstate his Twitter account, that would be a violation of the First Amendment; whereas when Twitter bans a user for extremist propaganda (even if that user is the President), they are exercising their right to free speech, because no one should be forced to platform anyone's views.

Part 2: Privacy

This is somewhat of a personal story, but I would like to tell it anyway. I used to have a VK account with some personal info on it (not a lot, but some; a couple of photos etc). Of course I had my privacy settings set up in a way that would only allow my page to be seen by active users.

You can imagine my surprise when I decided to Google myself one day. On the first page of search results there was a link to some extremely shady website with all the information I posted, my friends list, everything. And when I tried to contact the owners of the website, I found a form that would allow me to delete the page with my personal information for a fee. Of course I contacted Google to have the page delisted and VK to ask what they were going to do about it (they were most unhelpful).

Apparently someone created a program that crawled through every page on the website and copied it to this other website, exposing all the personal data. Sadly, I did not do a follow-up on the story after I made sure my name did not appear in the search results anymore.

Moral of the story: that's why I all my social media is anonymous now.

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