Twitter has gained something of a reputation for standing up for internet users against institutional authority, for instance in fighting a gag order in the Wikileaks case.
But even Twitter has to bow to censorship sometimes.
On Thursday, the microblogging service said it now has the ability to censor tweets by country. That may be an improvement on the previous position (when it had to block access to a message globally if it was banned in any country where it operated), but it hardly does much for the company’s reputation.
Twitter won’t say how often it has censored tweets in the past, though it says it stays out of countries that “differ so much from our ideas.”
The way in which Twitter has approached the unpalatable reality of censorship is a reminder of how much things have changed in the last few years.
It seems an aeon ago, for instance, that Yahoo got into a fight with a French court over an order to ban the sale of Nazi memorabilia. Yahoo complained that the requirement to block access for its French users would have forced it to adopt a worldwide ban, turning this into a test case for the reach of national power on the Web. With country-based filtering of the type just adopted by Twitter, that is no longer an issue.
Also, Google’s strategy for dealing with Chinese censorship has provided a new model for Twitter to follow. In the same way that Google highlights a search result that has been censored, Twitter says it will provide a warning to users when a Tweet has been blocked:
And through a site like Chillingeffects.org, Twitter can tell its users about all the legal notices it is subject to (or at least, those it is allowed to disclose.)
All of this helps to mitigate some of the impacts of online censorship. But the most important fact remains: it will be Twitter’s continued willingness to fight for its users, and not cave in every time it runs into local resistance, that will determine whether it remains one of the most open communication mediums in the world.
