Whoa. So many comments. Don't know where to start..
I was definitely not commenting on Twitter's action on this order, though I am glad that they're fighting for free speech. That doesn't mean I agree with all of Twitter's past decisions, and I don't know enough about Milo Yiannopolis's case to express a strong opinion about where I stand on the issue.
As with a lot of things in life, I think there's a huge gray area in this spectrum of freedom vs security debate, but I hope that we can all agree that being prosecuted for criticizing the government is past the gray area, as is citing freedom of speech as the justification to tweeting out a bomb threat. (I would put harassment that incites fear in others in this category, but whether to penalize those who encourage harassment or just those who actually do the harassment seems to be a matter to debate about.) And this particular case seems to be in the former bucket; even though there may be some parts of the law that allows the government to order the identity of the account, making use of that is abusing its power with bad implications.
Someone in the thread pointed out that the white house may not have known anything about the order (~10th paragraph in the article), and the article might be part of the fear-mongering happening on the leftist news. While I hope that that is the case, I think we should all still be vigilant to these signs of threats to freedom and our rights. I did not grow up in a dictatorship so I can only guess at how it starts; I don't think it happens overnight, I think it's a gradual process of taking away our freedom, spreading only their version of the news as truth, then more and more until we are that boiling frog in the pot that did not see it coming. But we can be vigilant and fight each time anything like this happens, as Twitter is doing now by fighting and publicizing this case.
I was definitely not commenting on Twitter's action on this order, though I am glad that they're fighting for free speech. That doesn't mean I agree with all of Twitter's past decisions, and I don't know enough about Milo Yiannopolis's case to express a strong opinion about where I stand on the issue.
As with a lot of things in life, I think there's a huge gray area in this spectrum of freedom vs security debate, but I hope that we can all agree that being prosecuted for criticizing the government is past the gray area, as is citing freedom of speech as the justification to tweeting out a bomb threat. (I would put harassment that incites fear in others in this category, but whether to penalize those who encourage harassment or just those who actually do the harassment seems to be a matter to debate about.) And this particular case seems to be in the former bucket; even though there may be some parts of the law that allows the government to order the identity of the account, making use of that is abusing its power with bad implications.
Someone in the thread pointed out that the white house may not have known anything about the order (~10th paragraph in the article), and the article might be part of the fear-mongering happening on the leftist news. While I hope that that is the case, I think we should all still be vigilant to these signs of threats to freedom and our rights. I did not grow up in a dictatorship so I can only guess at how it starts; I don't think it happens overnight, I think it's a gradual process of taking away our freedom, spreading only their version of the news as truth, then more and more until we are that boiling frog in the pot that did not see it coming. But we can be vigilant and fight each time anything like this happens, as Twitter is doing now by fighting and publicizing this case.