Since Twitter announced they were going to start blocking messages on a country by country basis if required by the laws of that land they have received a lot of criticism.
Most of this criticism of Twitter revolves around the belief that every message should only edited or deleted by the person who posted the tweet.
Anything else a breach of free speech and a threat to the underlying principles of the internet.
That utopian view of the Internet doesn’t translate into real life; the online world is as subject to laws as any other part of life and social media companies have to comply with the same laws as newspaper organisations or fast food chains.
Regardless of what you think of those laws – and in many countries they certainly are unreasonable and oppressive – they do matter.
Were Twitter not to comply then the entire service would be at least blocked in those countries and, should an action be enforced in a US court, then the tweet removed anyway for every user around the world.
By introducing country specific blocking, the service can let the rest of the world see a tweet that would otherwise be lost and in countries with restrictive or authoritarian laws, local people can still use the service.
A particularly clever way of dealing with removal requests is to note that the specific message has been blocked in a country. This adds a level of transparency and accountability to the actions of courts and governments that want to close the service.
We can see that being particularly effective in jurisdictions like the UK where British judges have been quick to apply “superinjunctions” preventing the merest mention of something by anybody.
Should Britain’s overeager judges start demanding Twitter block tweets, those in the UK will quickly realise something is amiss. The effect will probably be to increase the interest in the blocked tweets that can be seen anywhere around the world.
Despite the utopian view that transparency and openess will solve the world’s problems, we don’t live in that world right now and people can – rightly or wrongly – ask that false, defamatory and damaging posts on the Internet can be removed.
Interestingly Google this morning announced they will be introducing a similar system to deal with country specific problems on their blogger platform.
Twitter’s handled this in the best way possible, in many ways this could be a step forward for social media and the Internet in general.