Twitter filters content by geographical boundaries

Twitter has hopped aboard the censorship bandwagon, announcing (or rather, tweeting would have been more appropriate, although it would be pretty hard to squeeze in everything that they want to say of such magnitude in 140 characters or less) that they will start to filter messages as well as prevent them from being seen in several locations around the globe. According to their blog post, they did acknowledge that select countries do have ideas of their own on the boundaries of where “freedom of expression” falls, and “As we continue to grow internationally, we will enter countries that have different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression. Some differ so much from our ideas that we will not be able to exist there. Others are similar but, for historical or cultural reasons, restrict certain types of content, such as France or Germany, which ban pro-Nazi content.”

Twitter will begin to license their power to “reactively withhold content from users in a specific country – while keeping it available in the rest of the world.” They have also managed to work on a function that allows users to communicate transparently in some cases when content is withheld, in addition to the reason. While the feature has not been used yet, Twitter will inform users whenever their tweet has not got through. Do you think that this is a good move on Twitter’s part?

Edwin Kee
Categories: General
Tags: Twitter