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Jan 27 / Annie Ju

Twitter to Practice Censorship?

Twitter announced earlier today that it will start deleting Tweets in some countries. There have been many cases in which governments have complained to Twitter regarding some of the content that its users generate.
Twitter spokesperson Jodi Olson said that the company is doing its best to comply with such requests while protecting freedom of speech.
The tweets that Twitter delete will still be available to the rest of the world because Twitter values freedom of expression and does not want to remove content globally. For example, pro-Nazi tweets will be banned in Germany and France only. Olson also said that it will practice transparency by letting the users know if their tweets are removed.
I understand that user-generated Internet content can be uncontrollable and cause fervor or conflict. Twitter must have been bombarded with requests to remove certain tweets, not just from governments but also from groups, organizations and individuals.
Nonetheless, why must Twitter dictate what people can say in their countries? Twitter seems to be willing to accord with government policies – but what if these policies don’t do any justice? Governments may just be trying to censor Internet content for their own agenda and benefit. If Twitter yields to these regulations, we are losing another mechanism for expressing our democratic civilian interests.
Twitter may say that it only wants to emphasize freedom of speech, but, with this latest decision, it is only doing what it wants to appear to be against: censorship.

One Comment

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  1. mandy / Jan 27 2012

    This is a bad news. I recall that the Arab Spring is greatly indebted to Twitter and other social-networking sites for its mobilization. These sites are definitely more than platforms for freedom of expression, but also a means for people to practice their “check and balance” against their illiberal governments. There are lots of ideas which should be incorporated into the modern concept of democracy, and the idea of digital democracy should be one of them.

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