FYI

Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION

Why is Twitter tweeting to Beijing's tune?

By: Staff Writer

Posted: 02/4/2012 1:00 AM | Comments: 0 (including replies)

Charlie Sheen (PHIL MCCARTEN / THE ASSOCIATED PRESS)

NO one has ever admired me for my hi-tech abilities. There is no reason why anyone would. I can barely operate the computer on which I am writing this.

If I want to do something more complicated than that, I have to ask the help desk or collar some kid to show me how to perform a process that I will immediately forget.

I have a cellphone with which I can make and receive calls -- not only can I press buttons, I can answer the phone -- but it has a multitude of other functions that remain a mystery and which I have never missed not using (except that if people text me a message, I have to phone them back, which apparently makes me an object of ridicule among my friends and family).

I have never tweeted. I don't know how to or even if I could use Twitter. On the other hand, I have never squawked or squealed or ratted either, although, in a tight spot, I may have weaselled on rare occasions, but those are low-tech activities.

I know a few things about Twitter. I know that bad-boy actor -- child actor, I suppose some might call him -- Charlie Sheen is paid $50,000 for tweets because his every word receives millions of hits, even if, as is usually the case, he doesn't know what he's saying (and, no, not for the reason you are likely thinking, but because most of the tweets are written for him on a commercial basis). Celebrities are paid to pimp products in their tweets. Some might call this high-tech whoring, but it is perhaps more charitable to think of it as a kind of high-tech application of the world's oldest profession.

I know that tens of millions of people hang on celebrity tweets as if they were the lessons of life -- if God had tweeted the Ten Commandments from the top of Mt. Sinai instead of having Moses deliver them engraved on stone tablets, more people might have read them and, probably, more people would have believed them.

So I don't know much about communications technology in general or Twitter in particular. But I do know that when an international mass communications company with more than 200 million users worldwide proposes to limit who can talk to whom about what and where, and that announcement is gleefully welcomed by China, the last and worst totalitarian government in the world, that company and its customers need to do some rethinking.

Twitter announced last week that it would begin censoring tweets on a country-by-country basis to remove "illegal" messages from its network in nations that do not believe in free communications.

China rejoiced at the move. It is being called good business. It is a "pragmatic move" that eliminates Twitter's role as "an idealistic political tool," according to the Globe Times, which speaks Beijing. That should be a wake-up tweet to Twitter, but, sadly, China may have defined the decision exactly.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition February 4, 2012 J12

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