Editorial: Arm-twisting Twitter Monday, 30 January 2012 04:25

Twitter, praised and revered around the world as a tool of dissidents and activists, is now the target of a global outrage for something which its users had abhorred all along: censorship. That a company which has been identified as a champion of freedom of expression should undertake something which is the exact opposite of its avowed ideals is indeed deplorable, and unless reversed, can lead to consequences which the company will not like to see.

Twitter has announced that it is planning country-specific censorship of tweets that break local laws. Democracy activists in Middle East who have taken to the streets in their hundreds of thousands will be happy that the decision has come now -- after their uprising has achieved a certain momentum and results. Without Twitter, the revolution that we have seen in the region wouldn’t have taken such gargantuan proportions and would have taken a longer time to materialize. It’s the threat which this tool poses to authoritarian regimes and to non-authoritarian governments with authoritarian tendencies that has forced them to gag this medium. That Twitter has succumbed to their intense pressure shows its helplessness when faced with direct threats to its business interests.

Twitter is planning a complex system of censorship. Previously, when it erased a tweet, it vanished throughout the world. Under the new plan, a tweet which breaks the law of a country can be removed from that country but can be seen elsewhere. This is tantamount to killing the freedom of speech. The company also said it will post a censorship notice whenever a tweet is removed and also post the removal requests from governments, companies and individuals at a website. This could be a move to satisfy its customers, but knowing who had requested the removal of a tweet will give them no comfort.

Twitter must realize that its action runs contrary to its role as a catalyst of free speech. Already, protests are swelling worldwide against the censorship, with some users calling for a boycott of the service. The anger is more acute in countries, including in the Arab world, where people enjoy no freedom of expression and social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook were the seen as the best tools to circumvent government control.

Twitter now has about 100 million active users, which the company now wants to expand to more than one billion. The company must be made to realize that growth doesn’t come from censorship, but from supporting the freedom of expression.

At the same time, the fact that other internet platforms are subject to similar censorship should cause concern, and Twitter too might follow their ways.