Thursday, January 11, 2018
Constants and variables 86
O'Keefe has started a series on the inner workings of Twitter. As usual the "freedom" advocates are focusing on the non-shocking constant part and missing the evil variable.
There's nothing unusual about keeping records of all the messages, deleted or not. Any company that runs an email server has to do that. It's been the law for 25 years. Before the web, companies were required to keep copies of internal memos for a certain amount of time. And there's nothing unusual about being ready to submit those records to the government. That's why the records are kept.
These requirements have always been tyrannical and selectively enforced, but it's a very old tyranny. Not Twitter's idea, not Twitter's fault.
If you want to think of Twitter as a publisher instead of a carrier, the practice is less legalistic but even older. Publishers have always kept a 'morgue' of old copies for reference and for use in copyright actions.
The evil part is Twitter's attitude about this record-keeping. They are proudly using the records for purposes well beyond cold storage in case of audit. They are using the records to censor and inquisit heretics.
The second video shows an even scarier attitude. "Like flags and crosses and guns... nobody thinks that way. Must be a bot. Or a redneck." Bot = redneck = unperson. Since BotRedneckThink doesn't exist, we're not committing a crime by liquidating the unperson which unthinks this way. We're simply removing a contradiction.
Labels: Constants and Variables
¶ 2:04 AM
