Twitter can now censor tweets by country

[Newsjock]

Source: San Francisco Chronicle

Twitter said Thursday that it now has the ability to “reactively” block tweets so they won’t be seen within a specific country, although the San Francisco company vowed that “the tweets must continue to flow.”

Twitter announced the change one day after the one-year anniversary of the start of the revolution that toppled the regime of former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. That Arab Spring uprising, along with the Occupy Wall Street movement in the U.S., gained popular support with messages spread through online mediums like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.

The change could set Twitter up for criticism that it will censor the free speech rights of users. But it could also open a window for Twitter to enter huge markets such as China, where censors have blocked the service since 2009, shortly before the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square democracy protests.

Read more: http://blog.sfgate.com/techchron/2012/01/26/twitter-can-now-censor-tweets-by-country/?tsp=1

[DJ13]

1. it could also open a window for Twitter to enter huge markets such as China

Human Rights on sale for the right price.

[Jackpine Radical]

2. Sure. They can do that.

The risk is that people will set up alternative services to route messages around whatever blockade any private entity creates.

Im not enough of a techie to have any detailed knowledge of what I'm talking about, but the general pattern seems clear. Nothing will resist the ingenuity of the forces of sunlight for long.