14 DAY TRIAL // Last week, Twitter announced that it now had the ability to censor tweets on a country by country basis. Many people took this to mean that Twitter will now start censoring tweets whereas it wasn't censoring them before.
That wasn't true of course, and Twitter clarified the situation, but that didn't stop several countries from getting really excited at the mere utterance of the "censorship."
And now they've come in 'support' of Twitter's latest features. Thailand for example deemed the move a "welcome development."
The permanent secretary of the Thai Information and Communication Technology Ministry, Jeerawan Boonperm, added that she would contact Twitter to start a 'collaboration,' i.e. start issuing takedown requests for certain tweets.
It is illegal to say anything bad about the ruling royalty in Thailand and people have been sent to jail for the offences, granted not for using Twitter, yet.
The Thai ICT Ministry already issued takedown requests to the likes of YouTube, and Google as a whole, or Facebook. It plans to start doing the same with Twitter.
Even the Chinese press is defending the move, as PandoDaily discovered. An op-ed in the Chinese Global Times, argues that Twitter's move was an obvious one and that it was simply adjusting its policies to the reality of trying to enter as many international markets as possible.
Even though the op-ed argues that "boundless freedom" is impossible even on the internet and even in countries like the US, the analysis is actually correct, Twitter is adjusting to the different markets it encounters.
Even in this frame, Twitter's move is a welcome one. Twitter was already removing tweets on demand. What's more, not being able to remove a tweet in a country and refusing to remove it globally could lead to the site being blocked entirely in that country. It has happened before. Twitter had no choice than to develop the new feature.