Misguided Twitter Protests... And Why Twitter Could Have Explained Itself Better

from the think-this-through dept

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community. Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis. While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team

Last week, Twitter announced that it now had the ability to block tweets geographically , if necessary. As we noted at the time, this appeared to be a way tothe impact of censorship to certain countries. That is, rather than completely taking down content (as it would do before), instead it would limit the blocks to just the geographic region. On top of that, it would be quite transparent about this -- posting all info to ChillingEffects, and trying to let users know if they were visiting the page of a censored tweet.Unfortunately, many people interpreted this as Twitter giving in to censors and allowing censorship. But that's a misreading of the situation. Again: Twitter already takes down content when required by law. Now it's trying tosuch takedowns. However, because people interpreted this to mean it was getting into the censorship business, there were protests against Twitter , which I think missed the point entirely.The folks over at EFF have a good explainer post that details why this policy actually means less censorship, not more That said, Twitter still deserves some of the blame for the way in which it presented this. While it mentioned it in passing, it should have focused much more heavily on the fact that this was an attempt to limit the ability of countries to more widely censor info. Of course, there are some who believe Twitter should simply stand up against any and all attempts to take down content -- but the fact is that there are legal situations in which content is ordered to be taken down via a court order. In this case, Twitter is providing a lot more info and transparency than it was before. That's a good thing... but it's really not how they positioned their own story.

Filed Under: blocking, censorship, free speech, global, location

Companies: twitter