Twitter to censor on country-by-country basis
By Wilson • Jan 27th, 2012 • Category: Industry News
- Photo: Twitter
Micro-blogging and communication platform Twitter has seemingly swayed to pressures from governments across the world with today’s revelation that the service can – and will – now start censoring tweets on a country-by-country basis.
Policing with policy
The Twitter censorship policy was revealed by the service, wherein it now holds the right to ‘reactively withhold content from users in specific countries.’ BoingBoing pulled out a key blurb in the new policy, which read: ‘We haven’t yet used this ability, but if and when we are required to withhold a Tweet in a specific country, we will attempt to let the user know, and we will clearly mark when the content has been withheld. As part of that transparency, we’ve expanded our partnership with Chilling Effects to share this new page, http://chillingeffects.org/twitter, which makes it easier to find notices related to Twitter’
What it means
For folks living in the UK and much of the western world, this new Twitter censorship policy is unlikely to be too big of a problem right away. Though in the US SOPA/PIPA continue to be ongoing discussions and the UK government half-heartedly blamed Twitter for the recent London riots, Internet censorship is not currently an issue.
For other nations, however, most notably China, and many of the nations central to last year’s ‘Arab Spring’, this is a significant change of policy. Considering Twitter was used as a platform for rallying government opposition, organising marches, and general communication during those uprisings, there is little but disappointment to see in this decision.
What now?
Unlike SOPA/PIPA, there’s nothing the man on the street can do to overturn the new Twitter censorship policy, short of no longer using the service. Considering the tens of millions of people that currently use Twitter, it would be a collective action nightmare to organise enough of a user exodus for the micro-blogging and communications platform to do a U-turn.
Tags for this article: social network, Twitter
