My message to America is this: You can’t have it both ways. You as a country value radical freedom of speech domestically. Hate speech, anything, it’s all fair game. Fine. You as a country also clamp down on “sinful” behaviour like gambling and the soft drugs like Marijuana. Your country, you get to set the rules. But you try to impose your rules on the rest of the world when we do business with your citizens. A Canadian was extradited to the US for the crime of selling marijuana seeds to US citizens, which is legal in Canada but illegal in the US. You have arrested foreign programmers for writing DRM-circumventing software and foreign businessmen for running online gambling businesses that catered to American customers.

Your message to the world is that if we violate your laws, you will subject us to your justice system.

Now we have a US company that does business in other countries, and those countries have laws that differ from yours. Why shouldn’t they comply with those country’s laws when the do business there, just as you expect companies in foreign jurisdictions to comply with American laws when they do business with your citizens?

My feeling is that if you don’t want Twitter censoring Nazi discussions in Germany, hand back the Canadian who sold marijuana seeds by mail to Americans.

> A Canadian was extradited to the US for the crime of selling marijuana seeds to US citizens

A Canadian arrested and extradited by the Canadian authorities, according to agreements signed by the Canadian government elected by the Canadian people. While there is something to be said about American government lobbying around the world for laws and regulation beneficial to its interests, at least as perceived by the bureaucrats, it does not happen without the cooperation of (usually) democratically elected officials in other countries.

So very true! He was extradited by the same back-room wheeling and dealing that has caused us to sign on to ACTA. But blame in this case is non-zero-sum. I am against the actions of my government in this matter AND against the actions of the US government. I feel exactly the same way about his situation as I did about Sklyarov, when he travelled to the US and was arrested for something he did in Russia.

All I’m saying is that if you take the position that US companies should not be required to comply with the local laws of their users, then you should take the position that foreign companies need not be required to comply with American laws.

Either that, or hope that Twitter’s executives never hop on a flight to China and have it touch down in Frankfurt.

Wholeheartedly agree. I hate oppressive American laws as much as German, Saudi, Chinese, et cetera.

On the other hand, refusing to do business in oppressive locales is not the same as extraditing foreign nationals for breaking laws they had no say in and that technically shouldn't even apply to them. One is bad, the other is... not bad, to say the least.

Twitter, in the end, is an American company. If it was Canadian, I'd think it should comply by Canadian law. The other option, of having it comply by each country's own laws (the German example is obviously a rather tame one) is needlessly restrictive.

That various cases you refer to seem wrong (I don't really have all the data) but I'm not clear why they make it OK for Twitter to potentially censor dissent in a dictatorship, for example.

that's not the argument. no one thinks that when twitter does business in germany it shouldn't be bound by german laws. people think that twitter shouldn't do business in germany.

I’m ok with that argument!

Except that guy nir directly above you.

> How long do you think it would continue to be illegal to mention Naziism in Germany if Twitter, Facebook, Google, et al, decided to boycott the entire country?

Probably longer than it would take to develop local clones of those services.

As a side note, I do not think it would be appropriate for a foreign corporation to try to influence national politics of a free and democratic country like Germany. While it's not entirely rational, especially an American corporation. IMVHO Twitter, Google et al. should conform to the law, it's up to German citizens to change the rules accordingly to their will and values.

You can only take this so far. What if your company were required to kill innocent people in order to operate legally in another country? Would you do it, lest you be seen as meddling in local affairs?

Saying "I won't be part of your censorship regime" is not the same thing as trying to influence another country's democratic politics. They can take what I have to offer or leave it, but I'll be damned if I'll sacrifice my integrity for a dollar. This is probably the reason I haven't ever run a company. Yet...

You can also only take it so far in the other direction -- does every corporation have to be a supporter of completely unrestricted free speech? Is it wrong to provide Germans with your service on the terms set largely by the Germans themselves? Do you think foreign companies should also try to circumvent privacy laws they find unreasonable for example?

Of course I would not run a business in a country where innocent people are being intentionally killed by the government. Not even on principle, thought that too, but simply because of the risk to me personally, my employees and general uncertainty.

There is a difference between circumventing privacy laws and simply not operating in a country. While I would certainly not want a company attempting to get around laws, I see nothing wrong with a company not operating in a country because of those laws.

> How long do you think it would continue to be illegal to mention Naziism in Germany if Twitter, Facebook, Google, et al, decided to boycott the entire country?

I don't know about that, but Twitter has already raised questions over the practicality of English "super-injunctions": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_British_privacy_injunction...

I guess it's less palatable to censor tweets about Ryan Giggs than tweets praising the Nazis, though.

I would like to add to this that none of these companies seem to have a problem with ignoring local privacy laws.

Partly off-topic, but it isn't illegal to mention or discuss or openly talk about national socialism in Germany and Austria. It is illegal to glorify the Third Reich or deny the Holocaust. The only people getting convicted for this stuff are neo-nazis and related assholes.

First of all Twitter is not a "vastly richer internet giant". Secondly, the whole point of regulation is that twitter has to comply. What you pointed out they can ALSO do is sensor all the other tweets as a form of a boycott.

What the article points out is that for people opposed to sensorship, it's more productive to stop governments from sensoring, rather than pressure Twitter. If Twitter goes away, there is no guarantee other companies won't sensor things as well.

> Twitter is censoring users at the behest of their governments. They don't have to.

They do have to. That is a special feature of governments: they can compel compliance.

Sure: Twitter could just leave Germany. But does that end the censorship? No. It's still there; the only difference is that Twitter is gone. Good for Twitter's moral superiority, bad for everything else.

And let's not kid ourselves about how important Twitter, Facebook, and Google are. German restrictions on Nazi-related speech have been around long before the Internet and Twitter. They are not likely to end because of these companies.

Companies like these are only important to the extent that they empower individual people. To the extent they've assisted social change, like in Arab states, they've done it by being in-country and available to citizens. Not by pulling out in protest.

Laws are changed by people, not by tools. If the people have tools, but don't use them to change the law, that's the people's fault--not the tool.