Twitters selective censorship of tweets may be the best option, but its still censorship

22 hours ago May. 21, 2014 - 10:28 AM PDT

Twitters ability to block certain tweets or users from being seen in specific countries, a somewhat Orwellian feature it calls the country-withheld content tool, seems to be getting more popular, according to the Chilling Effects clearinghouse, which tracks such things: tweets and/or users are now being blocked in Pakistan as well as Turkey, and a pro-Ukrainian account is apparently unavailable to users who try to view it from inside Russia, at the request of the government.

In much the same way that Google now shows different maps to users depending on whether they live in Russia or Ukraine, Twitter is shaping the view that its users have of the world around them. Is this a clever way of getting around censorship, or does it ultimately just disguise the problem?

Twitter first introduced the selective censorship tool in 2012, after repeated requests from a number of countries to remove tweets that were judged to be illegal, such as pro-Nazi comments in Germany. When it was launched, the company said that Twitter would do its best to avoid using it as much as possible and to remain the free-speech wing of the free-speech party, to use a phrase popularized by Twitters former general counsel Alex Macgillivray.

Zeynep Tufekci, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill and an expert in the effects of social-media use during events like the Arab Spring revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia, wrote at the time it was introduced that the policy was the best available way for Twitter to protect free speech while also trying to expand its network into new parts of the world. As she described it in a blog post:

In my opinion, with this policy, Twitter is fighting to protect free speech on Twitter as best it possibly can previously, when Twitter would take down content when forced to do so by a court order, it would disappear globally. Now, it will only be gone in the specific country in which the court order is applicable. This is a great improvement.

As Tufekci pointed out, Twitters approach is a lot better than that taken by Facebook, which routinely deletes content from its platform with little or no warning, and virtually no attempt at transparency. To take just one example, pages posted by dissidents in Syria that are devoted to the chemical weapon attacks of last year are being deleted, which blogger Brown Moses has pointed out is thereby depriving the world of a crucial record of those events.

Its also true that Twitter has a much better track record of fighting for the free-speech rights of its users than just about any other platform: it alerted users that the Justice Department was asking for their personal information in relation to a WikiLeaks investigation, even though it was asked not to do so, and it fought hard in a French court for the right not to turn over user data related to tweets that broke that countrys laws on homophobia and anti-Semitic content.

All that said, however, not everyone is convinced that selective censorship is the best possible approach for Twitter to take. Jillian York, the Director for International Freedom of Expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, seemed frustrated by the companys increasing use of the country-withheld content tool, judging by some of her comments on Twitter and some critics of Tufekcis stance on the issue have argued that the feature actually makes the problem worse by making it less obvious that censorship has occurred.

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Twitters selective censorship of tweets may be the best option, but its still censorship