Rupert Murdoch Lashes Out Against Obama and Google About Piracy on Twitter
When Rupert Mordoch joined Twitter shortly after New Year's, he immediately took advantage of his 100,000-plus following and took to his feed to sharply criticize the Obama administration and Google over piracy concerns. Over the weekend, several "rants" appeared that claimed Obama and Google are supporting piracy in their opposition against the bill that many have recognized would allow the government to block domains arbitrarily and would amount to censorship. This comes after the White House recently published a response to a large-scale petition asking the administration to help stop the passage of SOPA. In their response to "Stop the E-PARASITE Act," Victoria Espinel, Aneesh Chopra, and Howard Schmidt wrote:
While we believe that online piracy by foreign websites is a serious problem that requires a serious legislative response, we will not support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet. Any effort to combat online piracy must guard against the risk of online censorship of lawful activity and must not inhibit innovation by our dynamic businesses large and small.
On Saturday, Murdoch tweeted:
So Obama has thrown in his lot with Silicon Valley paymasters who threaten all software creators with piracy, plain thievery.
Later that day, he tweeted about Google expressing the same sentiment about piracy:
Piracy leader is Google who streams movies free, sells advts around them. No wonder pouring millions into lobbying.
After CNET asked Google about Murdoch's accusation, a Google spokeswoman responded, "This is just nonsense," and said they took down 5 million web pages last year from their search results who were copyright infringing. Murdoch's sentiments against the company remain inconsistent, however. The National Post noted that he later tried to patch things up with the tech giant, writing that Google was a "great company."
Not only that, the media mogul is already getting into trouble with his microblogging snafus. In another post in which Murdoch wanted to suggest Obama's administration was losing public support after they declared that they would not back SOPA, Murdoch mistyped "POTUS" (President of the United States) as "Optus," one of the largest Australian telecommunications companies, thus accidentally suggesting that they supported piracy. Murdoch was quick to address the typo, though—he quickly withdrew his comment, tweeting minutes later, "Somehow my iPad changed my spelling. I should have checked. Sorry."
