Lately it’s been kind of the norm for countries to go their own route as far as Internet censorship goes; recently Iran announced they’d be limiting their country’s Internet accessibilities, and in China they are doing much of the same, despite Google and other organization’s efforts to persuade them into thinking otherwise.
The latest involves Twitter. Yesterday the social media site announced they redefined their technology to, “censor messages on a country-by-country basis,” meaning that specific tweets show up to specific countries, rather than Twitter’s current universality, or tweets that contain questionable content will be taken down where it is offensive, but still are seen elsewhere.
“I understand why Twitter is doing this—they want to be able to enter more countries and deal with the local laws. But, as Google learned in China, when you become the agent of the censor, there are problems there,” said Jeff Jarvis, a social media commentator who was interviewed at a gathering of leaders in Davos, Switzerland.
And while there’s no denial that these “problems” with social media are in fact “the law,” there is no dancing around the idea; Twitter will have to abide—as some even think the site is “selling us out.”
Twitter wrote in their blog that, “[o]ne 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 follow.”
In spite of this move, people have been quite obviously responding via the hashtag #TwitterBlackout, against this move that would threaten freedom of speech.
(via USA Today; photo via BoingBoing)
