Twitter to censor tweets

Twitter said Thursday that it has made changes to its network that will allow it to remove tweets in a specific country if required to do so by law.

It has, however, assured users that it will try hard to avoid having to do so because “the tweets must flow”, seeking to be as transparent as possible if and when it has to remove something, Gigaom.com reported.

The company said laws around what content is legal to distribute differ from country to country, and the new system will allow it to remove tweets only for users in a specific area, rather than censoring the entire network.

The company also has said that it has actually been deleting tweets — and in some cases profile photos and other content — for some time, but only in extreme cases involving links to clearly illegal content such as child pornography, or in cases where someone files a takedown request under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act because of an infringing image or avatar. The new feature that was rolled out this week will allow for more precise geographic control over what gets removed, so that if a particular tweet is ruled to be illegal in Germany, for example, it can be deleted only for users in that country.