cant wait till they make it person specific use your feet to do the talking for a change barton . . . . Twitter to enable country-specific censorship Micro-blogging service announced a shift in censorship policy away from global deletion to a country-specific model. Last Modified: 27 Jan 2012 07:34 inShare.1EmailPrintShareFeedback Micro-blogging site Twitter says they will visibly mark any censored tweet [GALLO/GETTY] Micro-blogging service Twitter has announced that they have altered the technology behind the popular site to allow for country-specific censorship of messages. Thursday's announcement comes as the service makes a push to expand into new territories in hopes of increasing their 100 million active user base and generate more money. One day prior, the service announced support for right to left languages - Farsi, Hebrew, Arabic and Urdu - in their crowd-sourced translation centre. The move, announced in an entry titled "Tweets still must flow" on the company's official blog, may raise concerns that the service could in fact be inhibiting free speech through the new policy. Censoring tweets In the blog post, the San Francisco-based company says that in the global expansion, they "will enter countries that have different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression. "Some [countries] differ so much from our ideas that we will not be able to exist there", the company said, adding that the new feature will be an improvement upon the old technology which would see individual tweets deleted the world over. Empire: Social networks, social revolution Twitter says they have authored the new feature with transparency in mind. In a move similar to search engine Google, Twitter says they "will attempt to let the user know, and we will clearly mark when the content has been withheld." Though the company says they have yet to utilise the feature, they, like Google, will share removal requests from companies, individuals, and governments on the webiste chillingeffects.org. One reason the service is believed to censor tweets is that if Twitter defies the laws of a nation where its employees reside, they then could face arrest. The 140-character messages, or tweets, that make up the content of the service, like social media website Facebook, was touted by some as responsbile for the string of protests known as the Green Movement following Iran's highly-contested tenth presidential election in 2009 and the recent uprisings in the Arab world. This was a role that Twitter and other public figures embraced, most notably, former national security adviser Mark Pfeifle, who in the summer of 2009 called for the service founded in 2006 to be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in response to the role he said the service played in Iran's Green Movement. Most of the tweets deleted worldwide through their previous technology, had contained child pornography
