First appeared in USA Today
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 counsel 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 transparent 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 roles in 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 protections 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.
