The drama over Twitter's censorship policy has been interesting. Activists were initially angered, but then all of the usual tech policy analysts came to Twitter's defense. I wonder if the EFF was not consulted prior to the announcement.

I found this all a bit annoying because of my personal experience with Twitter, wherein they arbitrarily disabled my account and censored all of my tweets for two weeks without ever providing an explanation. This policy means they are going to be super careful if a government asks them to censor a post but their own AUP enforcement is going to be as draconian as ever.

In any event, this post on BoingBoing accuses all the defenders of spin:

The way they put it, you'd think it might have happened once or twice. But until now, Twitter has never taken account of other countries' limits and never removed tweets globally because of them...

"Previously, when a government demanded that Twitter remove a tweet or block a user, access to that content would be blocked from the entire world," wrote Mashable's Lauren Indvik, about government demands that were in fact ignored.

"The new system would allow countries and private businesses to submit complaints [over] Germany’s strict laws against pro-Nazi speech or China’s laws against criticizing the government. ... Previously, when Twitter received such a request, its only option was to take down the tweet on a global level, making it inaccessible from any country," wrote the AP, about requests that were never acted upon.

"Previously, the tweet would disappear for everyone," reported CNN, about tweets that never disappeared previously.

"Until now, when Twitter has taken down content, it has had to do so globally," wrote the EFF's Eva Galperin, referring to political censorship, not mere DMCA takedowns: "For example, if Twitter had received a court order to take down a tweet that is defamatory to Ataturk--which is illegal under Turkish law--the only way it could comply would be to take it down for everybody ... the overall effect is less censorship rather than more censorship, since they used to take things down for all users."

Twitter confirmed to me that it has never censored a tweet at the request of a government.