Twitter Censorship of Drone Assassinations: Do We Need A Stronger “Mere Conduit” Accountability?

It was too conspiratorial to be true – links showing stories on the United States Drone Assassination Program weren’t showing up on Twitter if you were accessing Twitter from United States IP addresses, but were showing to the rest of the world. And yet, the proof was irrefutable, and when presented with it, Twitter apologized sheepishly. This raises all sorts of questions over Mere Conduit / Common Carrier – and strong concerns over its enforcement.

Vice Motherboard reported an obscure PDF which claimed that tweets related to the assassination program run by the United States known as “droning” were not visible on Twitter feeds if, and only if, those feeds were viewed from the United States. This caused immediate alarm as Twitter has previously agreed to hide embarrassing information for certain dictatorships for people inside those dictatorships – deliberately fragmenting the Internet, and the information available, by national borders. But hiding governmental assassination programs of the US from the US itself was something new entirely. In fact, hiding anything at all from people in the US was something new entirely.

The behavior was confirmed by Jake Appelbaum, a reporter and researcher close to Wikileaks, Edward Snowden, The Intercept, and other civil liberties groups, when a seemingly innocent question of his about Chromebooks was indeed gone from his timeline when watched from the United States, as observed by @brennanovak. This was pretty much a bombshell.

Getting back to Vice, Twitter officials declared there had been an “inconsistency”, and said the situation should soon be “corrected”. This non-explanation, for something this severe, is just not good enough. “Inconsistency” is just a hairsbreadth from “anomaly”, a word which – while technically describing any situation that deviates from specification – has come to mean catastrophic failure beyond other words. “The Chernobyl reactor containment experienced an anomaly.” “The Apollo 13 oxygen stir had an anomaly.” “The embarrassing Twitter feed on US assassinations was inconsistent.”

There’s also the “duck factor”, of course. The classic smell test. Does it seem like an innocent mistake that really embarrassing information to the United States government, leaks on United States extrajudicial assassinations – specifically how they kill the wrong person nine times out of ten – becomes invisible in the USA of all places? Not any of the other 195 possible countries, but the one country whose administration is very rightfully embarrassed by it? “If it walks like a duck”, et cetera.

At the same time, it’s important to be very careful throwing the word “censorship” around. It has a very specific meaning. Specifically, it does not mean that a service is refusing, neglecting, or malfunctioning to forward your information as advertised, for whatever reason. It means that the government is preventing two consenting parties from communicating a specific set of information, or preventing one party from broadcasting it blindly. Twitter, therefore, cannot do censorship by definition. They can, however, refuse to publish things from their own servers – which may have the same net effect, but it is not censorship. Just as your deleting a rude comment from your blog isn’t censorship, but exercising your publication prerogatives (it’s your platform after all), Twitter not publishing a tweet in some location isn’t censorship.

But it’s still troubling, under any name. And as the duck factor shows, we may well have been dealing with actual censorship in this case, and Twitter’s fault was getting caught doing it.

Enter a U.S. concept known as “Common Carrier”. The European equivalent has a somewhat more understandable name; “Mere conduit”, or in layman’s terms, “just a dumb pipe”. It’s a legal concept where you take on the responsibility of forwarding anything and everything without selection or modification, and in response, you get complete legal immunity for anything thus forwarded. Up until recently, it only applied to telecoms companies; it now also applies to internet service providers. Seeing how ISP third-party liability has been an extrajudicial shortcut to take embarrassing services offline – anything from The Pirate Bay to outright journalism – it may be worth looking at Mere Conduit in a larger scope going forward, and also allowing messaging services at the application layer to declare themselves mere conduits – or just as importantly, declare themselves not mere conduits.

Such a move would also have considerable historical precedent, seeing how the transport of newspapers was attacked in preference to attacking the newspapers themselves. The only thing that’s changed is the method of carrying embarrassing information; otherwise, most powerplays old are new again.

But it also requires a component that’s not there today – and that’s holding services responsible when they break their pledge of forwarding everything without selection or modification. It shouldn’t take individual users to discover this, with no less accountability than “something went wrong and we refuse to disclose further details”, as was the case with Twitter here.