14 DAY TRIAL // Twitter doesn't really play on the same level as Google but says it admires the tech giant for its stance on China. The microblogging service is all about open communications, not the biggest topic on China's agenda, or at least that what cofounder and CEO Evan Williams is saying. As such, the company is looking at ways Twitter can counter and circumvent the various censorship and restrictions imposed by governments like China, where Twitter has been blocked for months, or Iran.
Williams talked at the World Economic Forum, standing by Google's decision to stop censoring results in China. However, he believed Twitter was to small to yield the kind of negotiating power the Mountain View company has, so it's going by other means to get unfiltered information to the people that need it the most.
“We are partially blocked in China and other places and we were in Iran as well,” Williams was quoted (subscription required) by the Financial Times as saying. “The most productive way to fight that is not by trying to engage China and other governments whose very being is against what we are about. I am hopeful there are technological ways around these barriers.”
Twitter has a unique advantage though, it doesn't have the monolithic approach that Google and most other sites and services online have. Most people access the service through various mobile and desktop clients and only a few of them actually use Twitter.com. It's open approach towards third-party services and developers that has served to create a sprawling ecosystem around Twitter, but it also had the unintended effect of possibly making it harder to block altogether.
The CEO didn't detail how Twitter plans to thwart the attempts to block it but said developers were working on “interesting hacks” to this end. He wasn't too specific so as not to give away anything to the countries which would be interested in blocking the service but noted that people outside the company were working on the solutions.