10th January 2011
Twitter At Centre of Free Speech Battle
Mark Hanson
Twitter, the micro-blogging website, has found itself at the centre of a global free speech battle, as the US and China clampdown on the site and target human rights activists and Wikileaks workers.
In China, the human rights activist Cheng Jianping has been jailed for remarks made in a tweet, prompting a response from Twitter’s chief executive officer, Dick Costolo, saying to China that “year-long detentions for sending a sarcastic tweet are neither the way forward nor the future of your great people.”
Jianping’s lawyers are calling on Twitter to use its influence to put pressure on the Chinese authorities to release her, saying that the imprisonment is a “warning” to journalists, human rights activists and pro-democracy activists that they cannot use free speech to oppose the Chinese government.
Such news brings into stark relief the well-reported story that a United States’ court has issued a subpoena demanding that Twitter release details of the personal details and communications of leading Wikileaks workers, with suspicions that Google and Facebook may also have received instructions.
The original subpoena contained a clause forbidding Twitter from informing anyone of the existence of the compulsion, yet this was successfully challenged by Twitter and the subpoena is now publicly known.
Wikileaks released a statement saying: "Today, the existence of a secret US government grand jury espionage investigation into WikiLeaks was confirmed for the first time as a subpoena was brought into the public domain."
The individuals that have been targeted include an Icelandic MP, Birgitta Jónsdóttir, and the Icelandic government has expressed its deep dismay that the US is seeking personal details on one of its officials, saying that it is “very serious that a foreign state, the United States, demands such personal information of an Icelandic person, an elected official. This is even more serious when put [into] perspective and concerns freedom of speech and people's freedom in general."
The US is claiming that the exposure of embarrassing diplomatic cables comes under definitions of espionage, and the US authorities are seeking through a variety of avenues to permanently shut-down, or at least restrict, the activities of the whistleblower website.
Bradley Manning, the military serviceman who, it is alleged, passed the cables on to Wikileaks, has been held in conditions some human rights experts have described as “torture” by the US authorities. He is also named in the subpoena.
The consequences for free speech are profound as more draconian laws are being drawn up in, or already sit on the statute book of, various nations. Although the court subpoena is in the US, the global reach of internet services means that this is an issue of global concern. With increasing use of internet services by a variety of human rights activists (including Rabel) these developments could hold dangerous consequences for the future of political activity.
