Twitter on Censoring Tweets

Washington: Twitter has announced that it can now selectively censor tweets on a country-by-country basis, a move which may augur well for India which reportedly urged social media websites to remove offensive contents.

In its blog post, titled 'Tweets Must Flow', the San Fransisco - based micro-blogging company has said that it could "re actively withhold content from users in a specific country" if legally required to do so.

The proposed move came amid reports of a legal clash between India and global Internet giants, including Google, Yahoo, Twitter and Facebook, over pre -screening user contents
and removal of offensive materials from their websites.

A Delhi court had last month asked 21 social networking websites to remove derogatory content by February 6 this year.

In its blog, citing France or Germany which ban pro-Nazi content as examples, Twitter said yesterday: "As we continue to grow internationally, we will enter countries that have
different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression.

"Starting today, we give ourselves the ability to re actively withhold content from users in a specific country -- while keeping it available in the rest of the world.

"We haven't yet used this ability, but if and when we are required to withhold a tweet in a specific country, we will attempt to let the user know, and we will clearly mark
when the content has been withheld."

However, the micro-blogging service with over 100 million active users, said the removed content would be available to the rest of the world. Earlier when it used to delete a tweet, it would disappear worldwide, media reports said.

Along with social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, which is currently banned in China, is said to have played a pivotal role in uprisings that swept the Middle East region,
particularly in countries like Egypt and Tunisia.

omg why though?

twitter says they aren't censoring you,its the government
actually its the outcome of past day happenings like in Egypt ,India-anna hazare ,in Europe and other places,
people gather in huge amounts through Facebook and twitter
so country governments including india's try to put a ban over this fact by censorship of twitter ,which they say is misuse of right of expression

thank god Google didn't censor,they completely denied Indian govt.

damn greedy govt

to what extent can they actually monitor tweets? So many go out in one day, theres always a way to beat the system