Times are challenging for Twitter. Its stock price is down. Its product strategy is under constant scrutiny. And recently, it's put itself in the position of defying a government's claim that it's offering a venue for terrorists.
Tension between Twitter and Turkey has escalated steadily since the summer of 2013, when Turkish protesters took to the microblogging site to organize demonstrations and disseminate news. Time and again, the Turkish government has responded by blocking the micro-blogging service, prompting Twitter to turn to the country's courts, which have ruled that the restrictions violated free expression.
In December, the Turkish government raised the stakes, fining Twitter $50,000 for refusing to remove content it calls “terrorist propaganda.” It's the first time the government has tried to get the company to pay up. Twitter has responded by filing a lawsuit in an Ankara court seeking to annul the fine.
Social media sites have been under increasing pressure to take down terrorism-related content and cooperate with governments, amid growing fears that the Islamic State is using these services to incite attacks. At the same time, in keeping with the spirit of its product, Twitter has maintained one of the most liberal free speech policies among major social networks. "Twitter stands for freedom of expression," cofounder and CEO Jack Dorsey said, speaking at the company’s fall developer conference. "And we will not rest until that is recognized as a global fundamental human right."
This is a complicated enough challenge for an American company operating on its home soil. But defending the First Amendment right to free speech globally creates even more complexity and pressure. Nowhere is this more apparent than Turkey, where the Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan pledged to "eradicate" Twitter nearly two years ago, after leaked recordings implicating him in corruption circulated shortly before a local election.
Since then, Turkish government requests for Twitter to remove information from the site have skyrocketed. During the first half of 2015, the social media service received 1,003 requests to remove content, according to its most recent transparency report; 718 of them, or 72 percent, came from within Turkey. That’s a 50 percent jump from the previous six-month period, and has been punctuated by chunks of time during which Twitter was not available in the country at all.
But the real rub is that it's not the Islamic State that seems to be the Turkish government's main worry. A Turkish official has said that much of the material in question was related to the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), according toa Reuters report. Turkey considers the PKK a terrorist organization because of its 40-year history of violence in the country, and officially the US still considers the PKK a terrorist organization.
But more recently, PKK fighters have fought the Islamic State alongside Kurds in Northern Iraq supported by the US, and some see the group as freedom fighters for Turkey's Kurdish minority. This divide thrusts Twitter into a position where, whatever it decides about the PKK's tweets, it effectively winds up taking a side.
Twitter’s abusive behavior policy says, “Users may not make threats of violence, including threatening or promoting terrorism.” But Twitter is left to define what “promoting terrorism” actually means. Does a tweet promote terrorism if it comes from an account kept by known terrorists? What constitutes a threatening tweet? And perhaps most important, how does Twitter decide who is a terrorist? Does Twitter have the sophistication necessary to make these judgments across the world amid constantly shifting cultural norms and complex political upheavals?
When Nevada rancher Ammon Bundy led a group of armed men to occupy federal buildings at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon, an outpouring of tweets argued that if Bundy and his crew were Muslim, the media would be calling them terrorists. At one point, Twitter reportedly suspended his account, but did not offer a reason why. After a post in which the tweeter (@Ammon_Bundy) compared his action to the heroism of Rosa Parks was picked up widely by the media, the tweeter revealed himself as having set up a parody account. It was never the real Ammon Bundy. But the incident still highlights Twitter's conundrum: if the occupiers do take to Twitter to call for armed reinforcements, are they inciting terrorism or exercising their constitutional rights? Law enforcement will no doubt make its own decision, but Twitter has put itself in the unavoidable position of also having to make that politically charged call, whether through action or inaction.
As the director of the not-for-profit international policy organization The Counter Extremism Project, Mark Wallace is critical of Twitter’s take-down policies. “Twitter has looked upon itself as creating some sort of new constitutional right in the United States and a universal right abroad,” he says. “There is no right to tweet in the Constitution."
As we move into an age of asymmetrical warfare, where social media becomes a primary tool for people to mobilize, he says Twitter is complicit in attacks if it doesn’t take a strong hand in removing content. “If Twitter knows that its platform is used for this, but doesn’t do something, at what point does that become gross negligence?” Wallace asks.
Steven Stalinsky, executive director of the Middle East Media Research Institute, worries Twitter lacks the sophistication to identify tweets that promote terrorism in every country. He advocates for an industry standard developed by all social media companies to which they’d all adhere. "We’re at a point where everyone is using social media. This problem is not going to go away. It’s going to get more complex.” Indeed, White House and law enforcement officials plan to meet with Silicon Valley executives January 8 to discuss militants' use of social media, according to a Reuters report.
That’s not to say that Twitter is wrong in its refusal to adhere to the Turkish government’s requests to remove tweets. "The Turkish government is objecting to a single political protest account that they've labeled as terrorist content," Twitter's Nu Wexler, who works in public policy communications, wrote in an email. "We've reviewed the account and determined that it does not violate our rules, so the account is still active." It’s not clear what the content or the context of the tweets is, and Twitter didn't respond to requests for more information.
It's clear that Erdogan has attempted to crack down on free speech at every turn. At the same time, it’s critical to understand that Twitter has asserted itself as the arbiter of what constitutes free speech around the world, as well as what it means to promote terrorism on its platform. In doing so, Twitter has decided to export its own corporate values, which are in line with---but not the same as---the First Amendment, a decision that inevitably sets it up for the kind of showdown it's now facing against a backdrop of tension and violence. That’s a lot of responsibility for an ad-based consumer tech company that will just turn ten this year.
