Fears of Twitter ‘selling out’ over new censorship policy

An announcement yesterday that Twitter had refined its technology to censor messages on a country-by-country basis raised fears its commitment to free speech may be in jeopardy.

Twitter aims to broaden its audience and make more money by expanding its global reach.

“I’m afraid it’s a slippery slope of censorship,” said social media commentator Jeff Jarvis, 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.”

Egyptian activist Mahmoud Salem, who tweets and blogs under the name “Sandmonkey,” asked in a tweet whether Twitter was “selling us out”.

Twitter sees the censorship tool as a way to ensure 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 worldwide. 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. The move is similar to what internet search leader Google has been doing for years when a law in a country where it operates a service requires a search result to be blocked.

Like Google, Twitter also plans to share the removal requests it receives from governments, companies and individuals at the chillingeffects.org website.

“One of our core values as a company is to defend and respect each user’s voice,” Twitter blogged. “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, which is based in San Francisco, is tweaking its approach now that its nearly six-year-old service has established itself as one of the world’s most powerful forms of communication.

Daisy chains of tweets have been instrumental in political protests throughout the world, including last year’s Arab spring uprisings in Egypt, Bahrain, Tunisia and Syria. It is a role Twitter has embraced, but the company came up with the new filtering technology in recognition that it may be forced to censor more tweets as it pursues expansion.

Among other things, Twitter wants to expand its audience from about 100 million active users now to more than one billion. Reaching that goal will require moving into more countries, which will mean Twitter may have to submit to laws that run counter to the free expression protections, previously guaranteed under the American constitution.