Free Republic

The debate over free speech and content policy on Twitter– like on other social media sites— is often centered on issues relevant to political and cultural debates in the United States, where the company is headquartered. Yet this discussion of hypothetical censorship obscures the fact that company policies today are already used to silence important voices— journalists reporting from Kurdistan, who provide key information on political and military developments there at great personal risk.  While Twitter is a safer platform for Kurdish reporters and supporters of the Kurdish cause than sites like Facebook— which ban pages and accounts for posting photos of the...

This November will mark 40 years since the founding of an organization that has gained greater geopolitical prominence than most non-state actors ever will. Millions of Kurds— the world’s largest nation without a state, oppressed by the autocratic states that occupy their lands— support it and consider it their political representation on the world stage. In the struggle against occupation and denial of Kurdish identity, it has evolved an ideology based on direct democracy, ecology, pluralism, and women’s liberation that poses answers to questions asked by political movements around the world for generations. This is the PKK— Partiya Karkeren Kurdistan...