Twitter plans to censor certain Tweets in countries where censorship laws extend into freedom of the speech on the internet. The company announced the censorship program on Thursday.
In the past the only way Twitter could censor a Tweet was to eliminate it across the entire network, now the company has devised a method to allow Tweets to still show up in non-censored areas while censoring them only in a specific region.
Under the new method a Tweet may appear in its entirety in the United States but then feature the following output in a censored country:
In a blog post titled “The Tweets Still Must Flow” the company writes:
“When we receive a request from an authorized entity, we will act in accordance with appropriate laws and our terms of service
As a tweet is censored the Twitter user who Tweeted the message will receive a notification and the decision will be made available through Chilling Effects which charts cease and desist notices.
You might recall that in 2011 Twitter said they would never censor freedom of speech in a blog post titled “The Tweets Must Flow” in which they stateD:
“The open exchange of information can have a positive global impact … Almost every country in the world agrees that freedom of expression is a human right. Many countries also agree that freedom of expression carries with it responsibilities and has limits.”
On the other hand Twitter announced on Wednesday that they were launching in Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew and Urdu with words displaying from the right-to-left. With censorship a big issue in countries featuring those languages the new move appears to be a strategic growth consideration more than anything.
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