The Philippine Online Chronicles

More than a year after hashtag #jan25 on Twitter was used by Egyptian activists to invite people to join the protests against Hosni Mubarak, micro-blogging site Twitter.com announced that it may block specific content on a country-by-country basis if required, virtually imposing selective censorship in some countries.

In 2011, the use of Twitter was instrumental in information exchange during the massive uprisings in Tunisia, Yemen, Egypt and other countries in what is dubbed now as the Arab Spring revolt.

A total of 1,317,233 tweets were sent from January 24 to January 30, 2011 at the height of the protests in Tahrir Squre in Cairo. After internet service was cut off in most of the country, Google allowed Egypt to send voice tweets even without an internet connection through the use of voice-to-tweet technology.

But last Thursday (January 26 in the U.S), Twitter made an announcement on its official blog about withholding content from users in a specific country.

“As we continue to grow internationally, we will enter countries that have different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression. Some differ so much from our ideas that we will not be able to exist there. Others are similar but, for historical or cultural reasons, restrict certain types of content, such as France or Germany, which ban pro-Nazi content.

Until now, the only way we could take account of those countries’ limits was to remove content globally. 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. We have also built in a way to communicate transparently to users when content is withheld, and why.

We haven’t yet used this ability, but if and when we are required to withhold a Tweet in a specific country, we will attempt to let the user know, and we will clearly mark when the content has been withheld. As part of that transparency, we’ve expanded our partnership with Chilling Effects to share this new page,http://chillingeffects.org/twitter, which makes it easier to find notices related to Twitter.”

According to Huffingtonpost.com, once Twitter removes a tweet, it will alert users to censored tweets by replacing the text of the post with a grayed-out tweet that reads,"This Tweet from @username has been withheld in: Country. Learn more."

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, Associated Press reported.

Critics said the latest policy could be related to the recent investment to Twitter by Saudi Prince Saudi Prince, Alwaleed bin Talal who invested $300 million and owns 3 percent shares in the company but Twitter general counsel Alex Macgillivray told BoingBoing that the move has nothing to do with any investments that Twitter has received.

Internet censorship

Various groups have expressed concern with Twitter's decision. International information advocacy group Reporters Without Borders spokeswoman Heather Blake said in a BBC report,"In the bigger scheme of things it just opens up the floodgates. It allows for Twitter or other internet organisations to censor things. Freedom of information, and freedom of the press can be compromised.

The group has asked Twitter to reverse its censorship policy.

In an open letter to Twitter founder and executive chairman Jack Dorsey, Reporters without Borders said, “We urge you to reverse this decision, which restricts freedom of expression and runs counter to the movements opposed to censorship that have been linked to the Arab Spring, in which Twitter served as a sounding board. By finally choosing to align itself with the censors, Twitter is depriving cyberdissidents in repressive countries of a crucial tool for information and organization.”

“We are very disturbed by this decision, which is nothing other than local level censorship carried out in cooperation with local authorities and in accordance with local legislation, which often violates international free speech standards. Twitter’s position that freedom of expression is interpreted differently from country to country is inacceptable. This fundamental principle is enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” said Olivier Basille of the RSF.

In October 2011, supporters of Occupy Wall Street and its numerous affiliated groups claimed that Twitter is censoring tweets to keep mentions of the protests off its “trends” list.

#TwitterBlackout

Twitter users called for a #TwitterBlackout today, January 28, in a stand against the 'censorship policy' and what they see as a threat to freedom of expression and information.

A workaround on the said restriction was posted by TheNextWeb.com.

In mid-2011 Twitter reported that an average of 200 million tweets are posted daily. In 2010, users posted 65 million tweets while in January 2009, users sent an average of two million tweets a day.

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