Twitter to implement censorship strategy as part of international policy that will withhold offending tweets
Twitter has said it will now implement the policy of withholding Tweets in specific countries and has added a function that will communicate when content has been withheld and why.
According to a blog post by the social media service, as Twitter has grown internationally, it has encountered issues with differing countries and what content they wish to restrict.
“Until now, the only way we could take account of those countries’ limits was to remove content globally,” explained the blog. “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.”
Twitter has said that if it withholds a tweet in a specific country, it will ‘attempt’ to inform the user of this decision, and mark clearly when content has been withheld.
In order to be transparent, Twitter has extended its partnership with Chilling Effects, in order to help users find notices related to Twitter.
“One of our core values as a company is to defend and respect each user’s voice. We try to keep content up wherever and whenever we can, and we will be transparent with users when we can't. The Tweets must continue to flow,” the post concluded.