Twitter’s Country-Specific Censorship Tool Prompts User Protest

Washington Post: In a blog post, Twitter announced that it has a new tool it will use to block tweets in certain countries when those tweets violate local laws. In response, a group of Twitter users is planning a boycott of the service to begin Saturday.

“Starting today, we give ourselves the ability to reactively withhold content from users in a specific country — while keeping it available in the rest of the world,” the company wrote. “We have also built in a way to communicate transparently to users when content is withheld, and why.”

Many other Web services, including Google and Facebook, have similar policies.