HN Explorer

Twitter suspends accounts unfavorable to Sarkozy (internetsansfrontieres.com)

65 points by fnl ↗ HN
Particularly noteworthy, these censorship issues are despite French law allowing this kind of parody. Additional link (found in the article, too): http://www.internetsansfrontieres.com/Twitter-Censors-Accounts-Unfavorable-To-Nicolas-Sarkozy_a397.html

13 comments

[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 41.5 ms ] thread
[dead] dragonFury
Twitter should again implement the verification of accounts.
nextparadigms
So this is the kind of censorship Twitter agreed to? And this is the kind of "conquering of the web" Sarkozy meant at e-G8 last year?
coderdude
I'm not sure how "conquering the web" can be spun as something positive for anyone but the person said to be the conqueror. It's double plus bad when that message is coming from the leader of a nation. Any nation.
DirtyCalvinist
I'm wondering why Twitter would suspend those accounts. Does the French government exercise some power over them?

https://twitter.com/#!/_nicolassarkozy is accessible, at least here in the US, though @SarkozyCaSuffit and @MaFranceForte are not.

ephoz
The first was reactivated by Twitter after their owners complied with Twitter's recent changes in fake accounts policy. Apparently it wasn't obvious enough that it was not the official account (really?), so they changed the full name from "Nicolas Sarkozy" to "Nicolas Sarkozy Fake".

Of course, as long as Mr. Sarkozy was not a declared candidate to french elections, these accounts were all ok... Well that's (french?) politics at work for you.

For the others, it's just plain state-censorship unless I'm missing something here.

dxdt
Some accounts could have triggered some of the auto-suspend rules due to spam-like behavior.
rhizome31
Apparently @_NicolasSarkozy, the one by @kaboul_fr, is back. They had to explicitly add "Fake" after the name though.
mc32
Saying that the suspended accounts were "unfavorable to Sarkozy" and that's the reason for suspension is stretching the truth --it politicizes something. Claiming it's Censorship (gov't) rather than censorship (non-gov'tal) appears to be untrue. I don't see where it was the French gov't which came down on Twitter. Twitter seems to have a policy against impersonation.

They make a call and that's about it. If you were to impersonate my Twitter account, I doubtt Twitter would care. If you were impersonate someone of notoriety (where lots of people could be influenced on misinformation) they probably would take action. That would seem very reasonable to me.

ephoz
Although Twitter did not take action for quite a while. They must have been waiting for the french elections, because they care so much about that...

Another note is that for a fake account (humorous or deceptive) to be deactivated, Twitter has to receive a complaint from the person (or a legal equivalent) being impersonated.

BTW, other candidates to the election still have active fake accounts.

mc32
>BTW, other candidates to the election still have active fake accounts.

Have they informed Twitter and has then Twitter failed to take action on that complaint?

>Although Twitter did not take action for quite a while.

Had Twitter received a complaint and not acted on it, or did they act on the complaint in a reasonable time-frame?

>They must have been waiting for the french elections, because they care so much about that...

Whoever is in charge of "media" by the personality in question (a French politician) probably didn't scour for impersonators till the campaign was ramping up, is my guess.

I mean, sure, there could be conspiracies. Maybe the French gov't made a deal with Twitter --who knows, I don't. Still, attributing malice where none is evident and it's all conjecture is not helping any. There seem to be simpler explanations.

rickmb
Please. If an account is called @DehorsSarkozy, it's perfectly obvious to anyone that this is not impersonating anyone, at least not in any way misleading.

@_NicolasSarkozy I can understand, but suspending the others is completely ridiculous.