Twitter has
refined its technology so it can censor messages on a country-by-country basis.
The
additional flexibility announced Thursday is likely to raise fears that
Twitter's commitment to free speech may be weakening as the short-messaging
company expands into new countries in an attempt to broaden its audience and
make more money.
But Twitter
sees the censorship tool as a way to ensure individual messages, or
"tweets," remain available to as many people as possible while it
navigates a gauntlet of different laws around the world.
Before,
when Twitter erased a tweet it disappeared throughout the world. Now, a tweet
containing content breaking a law in one country can be taken down there and
still be seen elsewhere.
Twitter
will post a censorship notice whenever a tweet is removed. That's similar to
what Internet search leader Google Inc. has been doing for years when a law in
a country where its service operates requires a search result to be removed.
Like
Google, Twitter also plans to the share the removal requests it receives from
governments, companies and individuals at the chillingeffects.org website.
The
similarity to Google's policy isn't coincidental. Twitter's general counl is
Alexander Macgillivray, who helped Google draw up its censorship policies while
he was working at that company.
"One
of our core values as a company is to defend and respect each user's
voice," Twitter wrote in a blog post. "We try to keep content up
wherever and whenever we can, and we will be traparent with users when we can't.
The tweets must continue to flow."
Twitter,
which is based in San Francisco, is tweaking its approach now that its nearly
6-year-old service has established itself as one of the world's most powerful
megaphones. Daisy chains of tweets already have played instrumental rolesin
political protests throughout the world, most notably in the uprising that
overthrew Egypt's government a year ago.
It's a role
that Twitter has embraced, but the company came up with the new filtering
technology in recognition that it will likely be forced to censor more tweets
as it pursues an ambitious agenda. Among other things, Twitter wants to expand
its audience from about 100 million active uses now, to more than 1 billion.
Reaching
that goal will require expanding into more countries, which will mean Twitter
will be more likely to have to submit to laws that run counter to the
free-expression protctions guaranteed under the First Amendment in the U.S.
If Twitter
defies a law in a country where it has employees, those people could be
arrested. That's one reason Twitter is unlikely to try to enter China, where
its service is currently block. Google for several years agreed to censor its
search results in China to gain better access to the country's vast population,
but stopped that practice two years after engaging in a high-profile showdown
with Chain's government. Google now routes its Chinese search results through
Hong Kong, where the censorship rules are less restrictive.
In its
Thursday blog post, Twitter said it hadn't yet used its ability to wipe out
tweets in an individual country. All the tweets it has previously censored were
wiped out throughout the world. Most of those included links to child
pornography.
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