TWITTER HAS ANNOUNCED it has refined its technology so as to allow it to censor messages on a country-by-country basis leading to fears that it has departed from its previously stated “tweets must flow” policy.
In a blog post yesterday, Twitter said that it would now be able to restrict tweets from being read in certain countries where laws may be different while still allowing them to be seen in other countries.
Before this change if the microblogging website removed a tweet it disappeared worldwide but now Twitter has said it will post a censorship notice whenever a tweet is removed from its service in a certain country.
“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,” the blog post said.
“We have also built in a way to communicate transparently to users when content is withheld, and why.”
The company gave examples of some restrictions it might have to cooperate with such as the ban on pro-Nazi content in France and Germany.
As AFP notes, it marks a significant departure from its policy a year ago when anti-government protests in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya coordinated mass demonstrations through Twitter.
The social network said at the time that it would operate a hands-off approach in a blog post entitled “The Tweets Must Flow”. Twitter general counsel Alex Macgillivray later said that the company was “from the free speech wing of the free speech party”.
The new policy is similar to what Google has been doing for many years when a law in a country where its service operates requires a search result to be removed.
However, in 2010 the search engine giant relocated to Hong Kong following a dispute with China over its refusal to bow to the Beijing government’s web censorship policies as well as a hacking incident which Google said it had traced back to China.
Twitter said it had not yet used the new ability to wipe out tweets on a country-by country basis yet. Previously whenever a tweet was deleted it could not be seen in any country throughout the world. Most of those tweets included links to child pornography.
“We try to keep content up wherever and whenever we can, and we will be transparent with users when we can’t. The Tweets must continue to flow,” the blog post concluded.
- additional reporting from AP
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