January 30, 2012

Twitter Teeters On Censorship Line With New International Policies: Bloggers and Activists Fear that New Rules Will Allow Governments to Censor Messages — Which Would Defeat the Free Expression Twitter Embodies

Twitter is trying to broaden its audience and make more money by expanding around the globe, but the microblogger's announcement last week that it had refined its technology to censor messages on a country-by-country basis raised fears that the company's commitment to free speech may be weakening — and bloggers and activists from China, the Middle East and Latin America now fear that the new policies could allow their governments to censor messages, stifling free expression. "I'm afraid it's a slippery slope of censorship," said social media commentator Jeff Jarvis, in attendance at a gathering of business and government leaders in Davos, Switzerland. "I understand why Twitter is doing this — they want to be able to enter more countries and deal with the local laws. But, as Google learned in China, when you become the agent of the censor, there are problems there," he added, USA Today reports. 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 — but some Twitter users planned to go all of Saturday without tweeting to show their displeasure, using the hashtag "#TwitterBlackout." 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 — similar to what Google has been doing for years when a law in a country where its service operates requires a search result to be removed. "One of our core values as a company is to defend and respect each user's voice," Twitter wrote in a blog post, USA Today reports. "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 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, including the Occupy Wall Street movement in the United States and the Arab Spring uprisings in Egypt, Bahrain, Tunisia and Syria. 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 users now to more than 1 billion, USA Today reports.

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 blocked. 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, reports AP writer Michael Liedtke for the USA Today article.

"Clearly there is a huge user backlash against this latest move by Twitter," said blogger Mike Butcher, editor of Tech Crunch Europe. "It was seen as one of the few platforms that was free of any kind of censorship, heavily used during for example Arab spring and even in Russia lately over protests over the elections. It is, to some extent, something that we could have predicted," Butcher said, the article reports.