Twitter has said it will start blocking tweets in specific countries rather than withholding them across the whole network.

Twitter has said it will start blocking tweets in specific countries rather than withholding them across the whole network.

 

Tweets will be restricted on a country-by-country basis

Until now, the microblogging site had to remove a Tweet from across the service if it got a request from a government.

But the company said it now has the ability to block selectively messages from appearing to users in a particular country.

It said examples may include "pro-Nazi content" in France and Germany, where such material is banned.

The move to censor certain tweets is a significant change from its position during the Arab Spring in 2011, where protesters in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere used Twitter to co-ordinate demonstrations.

As the protests gathered momentum last January, Twitter signalled it would take a hands-off approach to censoring content in a blog post entitled The Tweets Must Flow.

Websites like Twitter helped garner support for protests in Egypt

"We do not remove tweets on the basis of their content," the blog post read.

It added: "Our position on freedom of expression carries with it a mandate to protect our users' right to speak freely and preserve their ability to contest having their private information revealed."

But now a new blog post by Twitter said: "Starting today, we give ourselves the ability to reactively withhold content from users in a specific country while keeping it available in the rest of the world."

The firm also admitted that even with the possibility of such restrictions, Twitter would not be able to co-exist with some countries.

"Some differ so much from our ideas that we will not be able to exist there," it said.

Twitter went on to say that in the interest of transparency, it had built a mechanism to tell users a tweet was being blocked.