By: Aseem Gaurav on January 27, 2012
The micro-blogging service, Twitter, says it has come out with a way to censor tweets on a country- by-country basis.
Twitter said in its blog that it could "reactively withhold content from users in a specific country".
The additional flexibility, according to Twitter, would give it a deeper toehold in countries that have what it called “different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression.”
The San Francisco-based company said now a tweet containing content breaking a law in one country can be taken down there, but can be seen elsewhere. Before, when Twitter deleted a tweet, it would disappear totally. Twitter would use the IP address to determine your location.
According to the company, the new tool would ensure that individual messages, or tweets, can be viewed by as many people as possible while it deal with different laws around the world.
The decision comes at a time when the company is going aggressive in terms of global expansion.
"On our international expansion, we will enter countries that have different ideas about the freedom of expression. Some differ so much from our ideas that we will not be able to exist there," it said in a blog post.
The company gave Germany and France as an example, which it said ban pro-Nazi content.
Twitter has been used prominently to by many of those involved in the Arab Spring uprising last year in the Middle East, forcing governments to shut down the Internet entirely. Twitter - along with Facebook - is banned in China, and the Internet is strictly controlled to block content that the authorities deem offensive or politically unacceptable. However, that has not restricted the world's most populous country from accessing social networking websites.
In its blogpost, Twitter said it will attempt to let the user know if a tweet is censored and will clearly mark when the content has been blocked.
The micro-blogging service, Twitter, says it has come out with a way to censor tweets on a country- by-country basis.
Twitter said in its blog that it could "reactively withhold content from users in a specific country".
The additional flexibility, according to Twitter, would give it a deeper toehold in countries that have what it called “different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression.”
The San Francisco-based company said now a tweet containing content breaking a law in one country can be taken down there, but can be seen elsewhere. Before, when Twitter deleted a tweet, it would disappear totally. Twitter would use the IP address to determine your location.
According to the company, the new tool would ensure that individual messages, or tweets, can be viewed by as many people as possible while it deal with different laws around the world.
The decision comes at a time when the company is going aggressive in terms of global expansion.
"On our international expansion, we will enter countries that have different ideas about the freedom of expression. Some differ so much from our ideas that we will not be able to exist there," it said in a blog post.
The company gave Germany and France as an example, which it said ban pro-Nazi content.
Twitter has been used prominently to by many of those involved in the Arab Spring uprising last year in the Middle East, forcing governments to shut down the Internet entirely. Twitter - along with Facebook - is banned in China, and the Internet is strictly controlled to block content that the authorities deem offensive or politically unacceptable. However, that has not restricted the world's most populous country from accessing social networking websites.
In its blogpost, Twitter said it will attempt to let the user know if a tweet is censored and will clearly mark when the content has been blocked.
