From EFF:
Yesterday, Twitter announced in a blog post that it was launching a system that would allow the company to take down content on a country-by-country basis, as opposed to taking it down across the Twitter system. The Internet immediately exploded with allegations of censorship, conspiracy theories about Twitter’s Saudi investors and automated content filtering, and calls for a January 28 protest. One thing is clear: there is widespread confusion over Twitter’s new policy and what its implications are for freedom of expression all over the world.
Let’s get one thing out of the way: Twitter already takes down some tweets and has done so for years. All of the other commercial platforms that we’re aware of remove content, at a minimum, in response to valid court orders. Twitter removes some tweets because they are deemed to be abuse or spam, while others are removed in compliance with court orders or DMCA notifications. Until now, when Twitter has taken down content, it has had to do so globally. So for example, if Twitter had received a court order to take down a tweet that is defamatory to Ataturk–which is illegal under Turkish law–the only way it could comply would be to take it down for everybody. Now Twitter has the capability to take down the tweet for people with IP addresses that indicate that they are in Turkey and leave it up everywhere else. Right now, we can expect Twitter to comply with court orders from countries where they have offices and employees, a list that includes the United Kingdom, Ireland, Japan, and soon Germany.
Twitter’s increasing need to remove content comes as a byproduct of its growth into new countries, with different laws that they must follow or risk that their local employees will be arrested or held in contempt, or similar sanctions. By opening offices and moving employees into other countries, Twitter increases the risks to its commitment to freedom of expression. Like all companies (and all people) Twitter is bound by the laws of the countries in which it operates, which results both in more laws to comply with and also laws that inevitably contradict one another. Twitter could have reduced its need to be the instrument of government censorship by keeping its assets and personnel within the borders of the United States, where legal protections exist like CDA 230 and the DMCA safe harbors (which do require takedowns but also give a path, albeit a lousy one, for republication). More
And, from Wired:
Twitter Censorship Move Sparks Backlash: Is It Justified?
Internet scorn for Twitter’s announcement Thursday that it would censor tweets was swift and unforgiving.
But even free-speech and other experts were divided Friday on the service’s move that it might censor tweets if required by law in ”countries that have different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression.”
Like Yahoo and Google before it — and for the same reason, becoming a global powerhouse — Twitter has confronted an inconvenient truth: Freedom of expression is sacrosanct and protected by the Constitution in the United States, but in other parts of the world, not so much.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which typically has no patience with any sort of censorship, saw Twitter’s announcement as little more than stating the obvious. ”I’m a little puzzled by the kind of freak out that kind of appears to be happening. Companies have to abide by the law where they are,” said Cindy Cohn, the legal director of the digital rights group.
The ACLU wasn’t as forgiving. ”The countries that engage in censorship are precisely the ones in which open and neutral social media platforms are most critical,” said Aden Fine, an ACLU staff attorney. “We hope Twitter will think carefully before acceding to any specific requests by those governments to censor content simply because they want to interfere with their citizens’ access to information and ideas.” More
