SAN FRANCISCO – 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."
This screen shot shows a portion of a Twitter blog post in which the
company announced it has refined its technology so it can censor
messages on a country-by-country basis.
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, 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.
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.
