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The Internet Social Networks

Kazakhstan Moves To Restrict Foreign Social Media Usage (reuters.com) 23

Kazakhstan's parliament approved a bill on Wednesday requiring owners of foreign social media and messaging apps to set up offices in the country or risk being blocked as part of a campaign against cyberbullying. Reuters reports: The draft law, which had passed its first reading in the lower house of parliament, focuses on protecting children's rights but includes provisions regarding social media and messaging software, which some critics regard as a tool to censor online comment. Once the bill is approved by the senate and the president, it will require the owners of such apps to register with authorities and open offices in the Central Asian nation, moves the government says will streamline the handling of official requests to remove illegal content. The local offices must be headed by Kazakh citizens who will be personally responsible for removing illegal content - such as posts deemed to amount to cyberbullying - within 24 hours of being notified, according to the draft.
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Kazakhstan Moves To Restrict Foreign Social Media Usage

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  • Starlink you're our only hope.

    • Heh, you think they don't have a kill switch?

    • I think you misunderstand how starlink works, you'll need to be within certain distance of a "ground station" which governments can control, block, blow up, etc.

      • Nope, that was before. No ground station required going forward once the satellite to satellite links are operational. References: https://qz.com/2054920/elon-mu... [qz.com] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/s... [twitter.com]

        • you're funny, that's future talk, investor hype. in short, doesn't exist right now.

          • They launched the version of satellites with the laser link capability a couple of days ago. It will be enabled fairly soon (within months for some satellites.) 95% of the planned network isn't launched yet (only 1700 are up out of 30,000), and all future satellites will have satellite-to-satellite links. Anyway, my point was that it will be a feature of Starlink that is not yet enabled.. which is why I used the word hope.

            • uh huh, forward looking statements of hope, hype and hooey for investment bucks.

              Meanwhile, you have to be within 500 miles of a ground station, and governments can control it.

              • OK, so you think SpaceX won't get it to work? If you think it will work, how long do you think, minimum, it will actually take? Of course, it won't cost anything to you if you're wrong other than you'd have been successful in misleading people.

    • Do you enjoy selling out your country's national interest? If Twitter, Facebook and Google have offices in Ireland, why shouldn't they have offices in Kazakhstan too? It's not an onerous requirement for large companies.
  • Even the portions of the parliament that didn't approve the bill, still had positive feelings [npr.org] towards it.
  • by Anonymous Coward
    Kazakhstan greatest country in the world.
    All other countries are run by little girls.
    Kazakhstan number one exporter of potassium.
    Other countries have inferior potassium.
  • Kind of expected from any country ending in "stan".

  • One of the costs of the new information control and censorship arising in the West, is that it serves as a fantastic message and blueprint to all nations across the world to do the same thing.

    Although some particular neurological types may find it supremely natural that the German government and Facebook's employees should be "THE AUTHORITY" to decide what gets censored -- other nations will see it as equally natural that THEY get to decide what's censored.

    In the years when rich countries' censorship was mi

  • When you extol export of something and try to ban its domestic use, such as social-media led anti-government protests, then you are present-day's British empire selling opium to China.

The key elements in human thinking are not numbers but labels of fuzzy sets. -- L. Zadeh

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