Twitter Can Now Censor Tweets, On Government Requests

Published by Minnaar Pieters on Jan 27th, 2012, No Comments

Twitter today announced that it would for the first time start censoring content based on a user’s location, at the request of governments. If a country has a law or is about to pass a law that restricts global interpretations of freedom of speech, Twitter can abide by specific country’s requests. While it has not yet been implemented, Twitter did give some examples of what it might refer to on their blog:

As we continue to grow internationally, we will enter countries that have different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression. Some differ so much from our ideas that we will not be able to exist there. Others are similar but, for historical or cultural reasons, restrict certain types of content, such as France or Germany, which ban pro-Nazi content.

Until now, the only way we could take account of those countries’ limits was to remove content globally. Starting today, we give ourselves the ability to reactively withhold content from users in a specific country — while keeping it available in the rest of the world. We have also built in a way to communicate transparently to users when content is withheld, and why.

Twitter has not used the system yet, but when it does, it will inform the user why their tweet might have been censored. Twitter is very clear about this policy only being about different location’s interpretation of freedom of expression, and not a way to inhibit the freedom of information flow.

But it makes one wonder – will it reach a point where a company can request that all tweets about a certain topic must be removed? Too many revolutions in 2011 occured which were somehow connected to Twitter and social networking. Twitter is saying they will be transparent about any censorship it does apply. Right now you can see which cease and desist notices Twitter have received so far at Chilling Effects.

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