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Codebreaker

Twitter begins censoring tweets

John Moe Jan 27, 2012

You can find people all kinds of things on Twitter and it tends to be a self-policing network. Folks who tweet stuff that’s dumb or offensive or misguided or hurtful, either get a lot of blow back from other tweeters or they don’t get followers at all and so are just kind of shouting in the woods.
But not every country trusts this approach because not every country is all that jazzed about free speech in general. Twitter will now honor the rules of some of those countries and censor tweets. It’s not an across-the-board policy, however. Twitter will, for instance, police neo-Nazi content in Germany, where such things are against the law, but won’t follow the much more restrictive censorship laws of China. The company says it’s unwilling to change to the extent where China would permit Twitter to function.

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