Twitter Plans to Throttle People’s Voice with a New Censorship Tool?

According to a new report from WSJ, Twitter has improved its messages filtering technology and now in a position to impose censorship in some selected countries on turn-to-turn basis.

Twitter announced its additional capabilities on Thursday which are potentially very dangerous for human rights of free speech and threatens activists struggling for censor-free society. It seems that the short-messaging company is now under the pressure of some hidden forces, likely political, due to which the company is planning for throttling people’s voice in some countries where Twitter is the only way to organize the protests and convey messages against their government polices and major issues.

However, some tech analysts believe that Twitter has no intentions to throttle the voice of people for freedom and individual rights of knowing and getting information about any particular matter/issue. They say that Twitter has developed this censorship tool as a preemptive measure and wants to assure that individual messages, or tweets, remain available to the entire world if at any point the company faces some kind of different laws and regulations made by the countries and web governing authorities in this regard.

Actually, with the help of new censorship tool incorporated by the Twitter will be used to eliminate a message in the country if the message contains stuff that violates any law of that particular country; however, it would still be available for considerations for the remaining world.

Moreover, whenever a message would be removed from one’s twitter page, Twitter will eventually post a censorship notice to the account holder. This is the same mechanism which Google has been using for many years when any law in a country where the search engine operates requires a search result to be removed.

Also, just like Google, Twitter is also interested to share the removal requests from governments, companies and individuals at the chillingeffects.org website, accordingly.

Interestingly enough, the similarities in Google’s & Twitter’s censorship  policies is the result of an interesting fact,  Twitter’s general counsel is Alexander Macgillivray is the same personality who has previously shaped Google’s censorship policies during his job at that company.

Twitter explains its policies regarding censorship in the following words;

“One of our core values as a company is to defend and respect each user’s voice. We try to keep content up wherever and whenever we can, and we will be transparent with users when we can’t. The tweets must continue to flow.”

San Francisco based Twitter, is now established as the world’s most powerful megaphone within 6 years only. The daisy chain of its tweets has already played a vital role in organizing political protests throughout the world, including the Occupy Wall Street movement in the U.S. and the Arab Spring uprisings in Egypt, Bahrain, Tunisia and Syria.

With this distinguished background, Twitter is introducing its new filtering technology as futuristic approach where the company might be forced to censor huge number of tweets which are likely made to propagate false massages on the basis of a politically motivated schema. On the other hand, Twitter is also willing to expand its reach to 01 billion users instead of existing 100 million active users.

To achieve its enormous target, Twitter wants its access in more countries but for this the company would have to obey the laws that run counter to the free-expression protections guaranteed under the First Amendment in the U.S.

So, if Twitter violates any law of a country, its employees might be arrested in that particular country. To avoid this dilemma, the company decided to dig out an appropriate way and its new censorship tool is the outcome of all that brain storming. Now Twitter can enter to somewhat bound countries having huge population but little freedom to voice out against the government policies like China, almost following the same pattern on which Google first time entered in China with filtering tools to censor many search results in China. However, Google abandoned that policy just after two years when the company came into a high-profile confrontation with China’s Government, Now, Google routes its Chinese search results through Hong Kong, where the censorship rules are comparatively soft as compared to China.

Twitter also made it clear through its blog post on Thursday that the company hadn’t yet used its censorship tool to wipe out tweets in an individual country. All the tweets which were previously censored were globally wiped out; most of those tweets contained links to child pornography.

Via: WSJ