Twitter leads the way. To censorship, or transparency about censorship? After the San Francisco company announced yesterday that it will censor tweets on a case-by-case, country-by-country basis, disappointed tweets and reactions abound. After all, Twitter has had a reputation as the social network that gives the most leeway to its users, such as allowing them to use pseudonyms, for example; CEO Dick Costolo once proclaimed Twitter as “the free speech wing of the free speech party”; the company fought a government gag order in order to inform those with WikiLeaks ties that the U.S. government had subpoenaed their information. (See As U.S. pursues WikiLeaks, must Twitter turn over user data?)
But Twitter is a business. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Jillian York writes, “Twitter is not above the law. … Just about every company hosting user-generated content has, at one point or another, gotten an order or government request to take down content.” In its blog post/announcement, Twitter says that as it expands its new policy is simply about staying within the limits of different countries’ laws, and says “we have also built in a way to communicate transparently to users when content is withheld, and why.” Twitter general counsel Alex Macgillivray told Xeni Jardin at Boing Boing that “this is not a change in policy.” In addition, he shot down rumors that the policy has anything to do with the Saudi prince’s $300 million investment in Twitter, which was announced last month. (See Quoted: Twitter’s royal investor has faith.) Meanwhile, Dave Copeland writes for ReadWriteWeb that by allowing users to change their country settings, Twitter is actually providing them with a workaround.
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