In the US, “In a disturbing trend that can have a chilling effect on free speech, law enforcement agencies around the country are seeking wide-ranging information about the social networking activity of political activists,” reported the ACLU yesterday. Particularly at issue were subpoenas issued by the San Francisco DA on Twitter concerning two anti-capitalist protestors, which both the ACLU and EFF considered to be over-broad.
As we wrote in our brief to the court, says the EFF, a “district attorney’s decision to prosecute is not an invitation for the government to engage in intrusive fishing expeditions into a criminal defendant’s opinions, beliefs, and interests, let alone the opinions, beliefs, or interests of third parties unconnected to the charged crime other than that they have once uttered the names of defendants or their Twitter accounts.” In this instance, the DA backed down; but EFF urges LEAs “not to engage in these sorts of unconstitutional, speech-chilling, fishing expeditions.”
Meanwhile, writing in the newspaper Le Monde, Najat Vallaud-Belkacem (minister for women’s rights) has called on Twitter to take proactive action against tweets that are illegal under French law. Her comments follow trending topics such as #SiMonFilsEstGay (‘if my son is gay’), #unjuifmort (‘a dead Jew’), #unbonjuif (‘a good Jew’) and #SiMaFilleRamèneUnNoir (‘if my daughter brings home a Black’). “I hope we can work together,” she wrote, “along with the most important associated agencies, to put in place alerts and security measures that will ensure that the unfortunate events that we have experienced in recent weeks do not happen again.” Discussions, she adds, will start on 7 January, 2013.
The response from commentators has been mixed. While she has much support, there is equal opposition. Jason Farago writing in the Guardian’s Comment is Free yesterday, said, “Digital speech is new territory, and it calls for fresh thinking, not the mindless reapplication of centuries-out-of-date principles that equate a smartphone to a Gutenberg press... free speech absolutism rings a little hollow, and keeping a hateful hashtag from popping up is not exactly the same as book-burning.”
This drew an instant and stinging rebuke from Glenn Greenwald in Comment is Free: “Ultimately, nobody needs Jason Farago, French minister Vallaud-Belkacem, or Twitter algorithms deciding which ideas they're permitted to express on the internet and which ones should be criminalized... Criminalizing ideas doesn't make them go away any more than sticking your head in the sand makes unpleasant things disappear. If anything, refusing to confront them makes them stronger.”
In reality, of course, Twitter will simply have to obey the laws of the land in which it operates. In the US, freedom of expression is protected by law; in Europe, freedom of expression is limited by law.