Twitter to Censor Tweets! Is Twitter Selling Out?

One of the best things about Twitter is that there is no censorship, there are no real controls either and no expectations about what is being shared on it. The free for all nature actually leads to some amazing discussions more often that say hate speech or even spam.

All this is might change very soon as Twitter will soon start blocking certain tweets to make sure they adhere to local laws of this country.

Twitter’s Country specific Settings!

• If you sign-in to your Twitter account and look up your Account Settings.
• It will show you the specific country that Twitter has classified your account under.

Thought users can change the country in the settings, it does not mean they will avoid their country specific censorship of Twitter.

Twitter associates the country specific information of an account thanks to a cookie stored on a browser. This probably will make it difficult for users to change count specific details just via settings.

Why Twitter has chosen to censor certain Tweets?

Actually, this is something that is unavoidable. Every country defines freedom of expression in different ways. For example in the US, all statements are legal. While spreading racist content is illegal in France and Germany.

There is also the question of copyright laws which can change from country to country.

Back in India, we have had the issue of internet censorship being raised. But without an actual law specifying what exactly is illegal, I doubt Twitter will filter or block tweets in India except the ones that are breaking laws in many countries.

The fact is this will make if easier for Twitter to grow a lot more in certain countries. This might make it a lot more locally relevant at the price of being globally relevant.

Do you think Twitter is selling out on its principles? Do drop in your comments.

(via Twitter Blog)