Twitter is caving to pressure. Once, Twitter was a big mass of jumbled Tweets of various intents, meanings, and purposes. Some were funny, some were self-promotional, some were blatantly bought and paid for, and some were just plain useless. Well, in situations where Twitter posts come into foul with local decency laws, Twitter has something they can do about it. Twitter has announced an intention to censor tweets by country; previously, if Twitter had to delete a tweet, it was gone worldwide.
“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,” Twitter said in a blog post. “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.”
The new method is most focused and, according to Twitter, more open. If your post is banned in a country, you’ll see what country it was banned in, although not why. Perhaps this is due to Twitter’s new Saudi ownership, given that Saudi Arabia is one of the most autocratic countries in the Middle East, itself an autocratic region of the world. Still, if you have to be restricting, at least be open about it.
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