Thing is, Twitter is a private, for-profit company, and ergo can do whatever the hell it wants. Frankly, if I were Twitter, I'd be doing a whole lot more censoring — from every racist football tweeter, to anyone who tweets "YOLO" and means it. No tweets for you!
This is what Twitter general counsel Alex Macgillivray tweeted about it: "We announced the ability to withhold content back in Jan. We're using it now for the first time re: a group deemed illegal in Germany." Probably not a big deal. I mean, this group is obviously a bunch of lunatics that needed to be shut the f*** down.
But not everyone sees it like this...
When Twitter announced its censorship plans back in January, a common view was that it was actually quite the role reversal for a youthful company that prides itself in promoting free expression (as free as you can be in 140 characters, that is).
"This is very bad news," tweeted Egyptian activist Mahmoud Salem, who operates under the name Sandmonkey, "Is it safe to say that #Twitter is selling us out?"
In China, where activists embrace Twitter even though it's blocked inside the country, artist and activist Ai Weiwei tweeted: "If Twitter censors, I'll stop tweeting."
Forbes magazine technology blog donned the headline: "Twitter Commits Social Suicide".
So what's the deal with the new rule?
Previously, when Twitter erased a tweet, it vanished throughout the world. Under this new policy, a tweet breaking a law in one country can be taken down there and still be seen elsewhere.
Twitter assert that there are no plans to remove tweets unless it receives a request from government officials, companies or another outside party that believes the message is illegal. And if they do remove a tweet they will post a censorship notice along with the removal requests it receives from governments, companies and individuals at the website chillingeffects.org.
The critics are jumping to the wrong conclusions, said Macgilliviray:
"This is a good thing for freedom of expression, transparency and accountability," he said. "This launch is about us keeping content up whenever we can and to be extremely transparent with the world when we don't. I would hope people realize our philosophy hasn't changed."
But Reporters Without Borders noted that Twitter was earning praise from free-speech advocates a year ago for enabling Egyptian dissidents to continue tweeting after the internet was disconnected.
"We are very disappointed by this U-turn now," it said.
In its brief existence, Twitter has played a pivotal role in political protests throughout the world, including the Occupy Wall Street movement in the United States and the Arab Spring uprisings in Egypt, Bahrain, Tunisia and Syria.
"This decision is really worrying," said Larbi Hilali, a pro-democracy blogger and tweeter from Morocco. "If it is applied, there will be a Twitter for democratic countries and a Twitter for the others."
I reckon that while Twitter loves its free speech thing, its no secret it wants to expand its audience from around 100 million active users now to more than 1 billion. And definitely to achieve this they'll have to engage with more governments and possibly face more pressure to censor tweets.
"It's a tough problem that a company faces once they branch out beyond one set of offices in California into that big bad world out there," said Rebecca MacKinnon of Global Voices Online, an international network of bloggers and citizen journalists. "We'll have to see how it plays out — how it is and isn't used."
Google for several years censored its search results in China to gain better access to the country's vast population, but stopped two years after engaging in a high-profile showdown with China's government. Google now routes its Chinese search results through Hong Kong, where the censorship rules are less restrictive.
While Twitter has proven itself to be fairy tough when it comes to protecting its users privacy from the U.S. government (challenging the Justice Department on their WikiLeaks manhunt), they have bent before (delaying planned upgrade at the State Department's request in 2009).
Now though, the people who need Twitter the most are the ones who live in places where their governments attempt to silent discontent. I really hope Twitter will find a way to work with these countries to give people the ability to broadcast their messages.
In the meantime, maybe we can all come up with sensible loophole suggestions? Couldn't one just change one's "Country" setting to get round this?
L.
