
Twitter locks WikiLeaks account days before Assange's extradition hearing - akvadrako
https://yro.slashdot.org/story/20/02/17/2121236/twitter-locks-wikileaks-official-account-with-54-million-followers-days-before-julian-assanges-extradition-hearing
======
black_puppydog
This might be a good moment to remind people that Assange has been the victim
of a successful smear campaign since the moment a woman did NOT make a rape
allegation against him in Sweden. Nils Melzer, UN special rapporteur on
torture, actually went over the original proceedings and gave a long format
interview on the matter lately. He too took some convincing to even touch the
case, that's how effective sexual violence as a smear tactic is. Which is a
damn shame, given that there's plenty of _real_ sexual violence to go around,
and which now once more gets harder to make visible.

Here's the interview: [https://www.republik.ch/2020/01/31/nils-melzer-about-
wikilea...](https://www.republik.ch/2020/01/31/nils-melzer-about-wikileaks-
founder-julian-assange)

tl;dr:

Assange was right about everything that has been made falsifiable: secret
indictment, spying on his lawyers, extradition to the US, no fair trial, the
whole lot. He's showing every mental and physical sign of being tortured. He
needs help, and he's being denied the very rights that western society
purports to uphold.

EDIT: and that is leaving aside the whole dimension of Sweden, the UK,
Equador, and of course the US making (even more of) a precedent out of him.
What this means for the free press, and the relationship between freedom (of
expression, of information, and in this case of truth, really) vs national
"security" (in this case, the national security to not be held accountable for
shooting down civilians) should send shivers down everyone's spines.

EDIT 2 To the people downvoting: care to express which part of the above
exactly you disagree with? Do you think it's factually incorrect? How about
correcting it then? Do you think it's inappropriate? Why so? Off topic?

~~~
sorenjan
The article is not completely truthful about what happened, at least according
to the police report. The interviewee claims to speak fluent Swedish, so
there's no way he'd miss it accidentally. Here's the short version of what
happened according to the official police investigation[0]:

Assange and a woman have consensual sex. He wants to have sex without a
condom, she insist he wears one. Eventually he agrees, and they have sex and
then fall asleep in the bed. The next morning she wakes up by him penetrating
her. She asks "are you wearing anything?" to which he replies "you". Her main
reason she wanted him to wear a condom was fear of STDs, so she thinks there's
no point in stopping now since the eventual damage is already done, so they
continue. He comes inside her.

When she later asks the police if there's a way of forcing Assange to take an
HIV test the police decides that what she's describing constitutes rape, and
starts an investigation.

The whole problem is that she gave her consent under the strict condition that
he'd wear a condom. When he started having unprotected sex with her while she
was sleeping, he didn't have her consent. Call that what you want.

[0] [https://www.magasinetparagraf.se/wp-
content/uploads/content/...](https://www.magasinetparagraf.se/wp-
content/uploads/content/bilden/forundersokningen-avseende-
assange/AssangeSexAllegations.pdf#page=13)

Edit: OK, I see that that's mentioned later in the article. But the part about
rewriting the statement isn't completely truthful either: > "Now the
supervisor of the policewoman who had conducted the questioning wrote her an
email telling her to rewrite the statement from S. W."

What the mail actually says is that there are two hearings, but only one
formal one, and they want the second one included too. The supervisor writes:
"Make a new hearing. Paste the text in that and assign the hearing to the
case. Sign the hearing."

~~~
gadders
>>The whole problem is that she gave her consent under the strict condition
that he'd wear a condom.

It's called "stealthing", apparently, and it looks like it could be an offence
under UK law as he only had "conditional consent":
[https://www.kingsleynapley.co.uk/insights/blogs/criminal-
law...](https://www.kingsleynapley.co.uk/insights/blogs/criminal-law-
blog/stealthing-conviction-brings-conditional-consent-out-in-the-open)

~~~
sorenjan
I believe stealthing generally is taking the condom of during sex without her
noticing it, but the idea is the same. Consent given under a certain condition
is only consent while that condition is met.

------
jjordan
This is a growing problem. I'm not sure what the solution is, but something
needs to be done to stem the absolute power that social media companies have
to arbitrarily censor voices.

~~~
Notorious_BLT
The solution to this seems pretty straightforward: force social media
companies to choose to identify as a "platform" or a "publisher", rather than
a mix of the two that gets to claim the most convenient aspects of both.

If they choose "platform", then they can take no responsibility for content
posted, but also allow all content, and only remove content when it is
required of them by the legal system (when the content is illegal and has been
reported as such)

If they choose "publisher" then they are free to censor, "deplatform", delete,
or restrict posting of anything they wish, but if someone posts something
illegal, they take their share of legal responsibility for publishing it.

~~~
dwild
That seems like a good idea but it's simplify the issue way too much.

> but also allow all content,

Almost no platform survive without a bit of moderation. If you don't moderate,
you'll get any kind of content, including spam, troll, etc...

Add that to the fact that you'll get people that will just push to boycott
such kind of platforms, and thus you'll no longer have much possible ways to
make this kind of platform exist.

> but if someone posts something illegal, they take their share of legal
> responsibility for publishing it.

That's also kind of impossible. The law evolved to consider that impossibility
to look at every piece of content, and this is why the DMCA exist. Look at
Youtube which try to filter their content much further than the law currently
require, they have HUGE teams of moderators, multiple tens of thousands, with
some of the best kind of neural network, working on this and yet it fail so
often.

The world isn't binary, we need a bit of both.

It could be an interesting experiment though to allow legally the kind of
platform you suggest. Someway to protect website owner from any legal
retaliation. It would most probably look like 4chan, but still interesting.

~~~
dntbnmpls
> Almost no platform survive without a bit of moderation. If you don't
> moderate, you'll get any kind of content, including spam, troll, etc...

There is moderation and there is censorship. Nobody is against filtering spam.
Trolling is fine in my opinion. Just let the user have the option of blocking
who they want to block an follow who they want to follow.

> Add that to the fact that you'll get people that will just push to boycott
> such kind of platforms, and thus you'll no longer have much possible ways to
> make this kind of platform exist.

If that was true, twitter, reddit, facebook, google wouldn't exist in the
first place.

> That's also kind of impossible.

No it is not. Publishers don't find it impossible. Platforms don't find it
impossible. If it was impossible, telcoms and publishers wouldn't exist.

> It could be an interesting experiment though to allow legally the kind of
> platform you suggest.

We already had this kind of platform.

> It would most probably look like 4chan, but still interesting.

No, it would look like 2009-2013 twitter, reddit, facebook, etc.

~~~
AlexMax
> There is moderation and there is censorship. Nobody is against filtering
> spam. Trolling is fine in my opinion. Just let the user have the option of
> blocking who they want to block an follow who they want to follow.

In my experience, most people are not interested in sifting through mountains
of garbage just to pick out a few morsels of a decent conversation. If you let
trolls and bad-faith actors persist on your site, soon those people will be
the only folks who are left.

~~~
dntbnmpls
> In my experience, most people are not interested in sifting through
> mountains of garbage just to pick out a few morsels of a decent
> conversation.

If that was true, HN would be infinitely more popular than reddit.

> If you let trolls and bad-faith actors persist on your site, soon those
> people will be the only folks who are left.

No. If you let users block trolls and bad-faith actors, they go away.

Once again, if you were right, twitter, reddit, facebook, etc wouldn't have
grown to what they are today.

~~~
geofft
> _If that was true, HN would be infinitely more popular than reddit._

Reddit communities live and die by the strength of their moderation. Sure,
Reddit as a whole is mountains of garbage. But the beauty (if that's the word)
of the subreddit system is that to folks who want to talk about communism,
hating women and minorities is garbage, and to folks who want to hate women
and minorities, communism is garbage, and _they both get the experience they
want_.

Reddit's popularity is due to the fact that a) people have multiple interests
and so they want to hop communities with low activation energy (same high-
level reason that GitHub got popular over individual git hosting sites: you
already have an account) and b) there is some correlation between being a
"bad-faith actor" across communities, regardless of their specific moderation
worldview (e.g., neither /r/GamersRiseUp nor /r/FULLCOMMUNISM is interested in
V1agr4), and so "you have some karma at all, regardless of source" is a useful
filter.

> _Once again, if you were right, twitter, reddit, facebook, etc wouldn 't
> have grown to what they are today._

All of these systems put work into blocking abusive participants site-wide
(including real humans who are very carefully and intentionally spewing
vitriol) and are increasingly _automatically_ blocking them.

~~~
dntbnmpls
> Reddit communities live and die by the strength of their moderation.

Hence why I wasn't against moderation. I'm against censorship. I'm all for
limiting "communism" subreddit to the topic of communism ( moderation ).
However, I'm against the communism subreddit censoring people saying nasty
things about stalin or what have you ( censorship ).

Like how politics, atheism and other popular subreddits used to be open
platforms for people to express how they truly feel. Until the shift happened
and they turned into censored hellholes.

> All of these systems put work into blocking abusive participants site-wide
> (including real humans who are very carefully and intentionally spewing
> vitriol) and are increasingly automatically blocking them.

No. All of these systems put into censoring people they disagree with. If
truly "spewing vitriol" was the reason, then politics, worldnews,
twoxchromosome, atheism and every major sub would be banned.

As long as the "vitriol" was pertinent to the topic, it should be allowed.
After all, that's the point of the voting system right? If you don't like it,
vote it down.

The 2009-2013 social media was great because everyone got to spew their
vitriol so it evened things out. Now the vitriol is so concentrated that you
have shitholes like politics and the_donald. Funnily enough, one is
quarantined and the other isn't.

Moderation is okay. Censorship isn't.

~~~
AlexMax
I don't agree with your core conceit of delineating between moderation and
censorship, but this threw me:

> As long as the "vitriol" was pertinent to the topic, it should be allowed.
> After all, that's the point of the voting system right? If you don't like
> it, vote it down.

Voting systems as implemented by many popular sites are moderation/censorship
via mob rule, and I'm surprised that you advocate for it.

I actually prefer having actual moderators to having a post voted down because
five random people disagreed with my opinion and wanted to hide it in a
attempt to control the narrative of the comment thread.

That's a problem even this site doesn't manage to avoid. Heck, look at your
posts; in this comment thread, people are downvoting you in an attempt to hide
your opinion, and I don't even agree with you.

------
_-___________-_
> He flew with Scandinavian Airlines from Stockholm to Berlin. During the
> flight, his laptops disappeared from his checked baggage.

Laptops in checked baggage? Seriously? I really cannot believe that Assange
wouldn't know better than this.

~~~
john_minsk
I'm more interested in how did he manage to check them in. Where I fly I can't
put anything with a battery into my checked in bags...

------
viralpoetry
Worth to mention that Brazil charged Intercept co-founder Glenn Greenwald with
cybercrime charges similar to Assange. The guy who first met Snowden in HK
with Laura Poitras.

Even if it looks like they have "postponed" prosecution for now.

[https://theintercept.com/2020/02/06/glenn-greenwald-
intercep...](https://theintercept.com/2020/02/06/glenn-greenwald-intercept-
brazil-charges/)

------
app4soft
> _Twitter locks WikiLeaks account days before_

Was there any story with WikiLeaks account on Mastodon?

------
persepoliisi
Big thanks twitter! You really never suprise me any positive actions. So sad
that we have big tech companies like that existing today.

I'm ditching twitter long time ago.. too much sensor and negativity from that
company.

------
lkjhgfdsa0
It is no longer locked

------
DyslexicAtheist
it's pretty sad to see otherwise extremely bright people who are able to spot
censorship in China, Russia etc, and who normally would stand up for human
rights, to applaud or defend this Twitter shut down of Wikileaks. It is
exactly the goal of propaganda to give people the ability to spot its effects
when it comes from the enemy and make it invisible when done by their own
state.

"This is America" \-- sings Childish Gambino (... actually this is Everywhere,
thanks to global reach of US propaganda and the West alignment with US
language in policy)

------
clSTophEjUdRanu
Twitter closes Twitter account.

Twitter owes you nothing. Don't use them.

~~~
dontdoitpls
I don't.

But I also don't like Facebook's forced news.

Reddit is decent as long as the subreddit isn't big enough to be
astroturfed... But big companies can do searches...

This place is probably the worst out of the social networks I use for
censorship.

Snapchat is good

~~~
tree3
> But I also don't like Facebook's forced news.

There's nothing forced about FB. You don't have to use FB, it's that simple.

~~~
n0rbwah
No but given the place it occupies in today's world, everyone's entitled to
their opinion on FB and the harm it may cause, whether they use it or not.

~~~
tree3
> given the place it occupies in today's world

I don't use FB. FB occupies no space in my world.

------
sopra2k
unbelievable

------
olliej
did they also lock the accounts of US government agencies and representatives?

~~~
clSTophEjUdRanu
Why would they?

~~~
olliej
They locked the account of a pro-assange org, so it seems that they should be
applying such decisions equally. After all, the government isn’t guaranteed
free speech - that’s a right of the people.

~~~
tree3
> so it seems that they should be applying such decisions equally

No, why would they do that?

> After all, the government isn’t guaranteed free speech

Twitter is a private organization. There is no such thing as "free speech" in
the private world.

------
gadders
All I would say on this is, don't cheer when your political opponents get
deplatformed, and then complain when it happens to your side of the fence.

------
ycombonator
Population of US: 330 million Twitter US MAUs: 68 million % of Bots on
Twitter: ~ 15% So Twitter users that really matter: ~ 57 million Way
overrated.

