Twitter has now announced that it is able to censor tweets and content on a per-country basis. While that may sound menacing, it's actually an improvement and gives Twitter the ability to best serve its users across the globe.

Various countries have various laws, even the ones most would consider democracies that respect free speech and the right to expression. By law Twitter may be asked to take down certain tweets or even entire accounts in any one country.

It would be obligated to do so if it plans to operate in that particular country and not face various penalties. Until now, if it had to censor a tweet, it would be censored globally, i.e. nobody would be able to see it. Twitter now has the ability to censor content granularly.

"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. We have also built in a way to communicate transparently to users when content is withheld, and why," Twitter explained.

"We haven’t yet used this ability, but if and when we are required to withhold a Tweet in a specific country, we will attempt to let the user know, and we will clearly mark when the content has been withheld," it added.

If it has to use the feature, Twitter plans to make it very clear to users that content has been censored. It will work with Chilling Effects for this. Users in the affected countries will see a notice and will be able to go to a new Chilling Effects page to see why the certain tweet was removed.

To date, Twitter has had to censor tweets, but almost exclusively as part of DMCA takedown notice for content allegedly infringing copyright.