Censorship of Twitter

Censorship of Twitter refers to Internet censorship by governments that block access to Twitter, or censorship by Twitter itself. Twitter censorship also includes governmental notice and take down requests to Twitter, which Twitter enforces in accordance with its Terms of Service when a government or authority submits a valid removal request to Twitter indicating that specific content (such as a tweet) is illegal in their jurisdiction.

This article is about government censorship of Twitter. For barring of users by Twitter itself, see Twitter suspensions.

Restrictions based on government request

Twitter acts on complaints by third parties, including governments, to remove illegal content in accordance with the laws of the countries in which people use the service. On processing a successful complaint about an illegal tweet from "government officials, companies or another outside party", the social networking site will notify users from that country that they may not see it.[1]

France
Main article: Internet censorship in France

Following the posting of an antisemitic and racist posts by anonymous users, Twitter removed those posts from its service. Lawsuits were filed by the Union of Jewish Students (UEJF), a French advocacy group and, on January 24, 2013, Judge Anne-Marie Sauteraud ordered Twitter to divulge the personally identifiable information about the user who posted the antisemitic post, charging that the posts violated French laws against hate speech. Twitter responded by saying that it was "reviewing its options" regarding the French charges. Twitter was given two weeks to comply with the court order before daily fines of €1,000 (about US$1,300) would be assessed. Issues over jurisdiction arise, because Twitter has no offices nor employees within France, so it is unclear how a French court could sanction Twitter.[2][3][4]

India
Main article: Internet censorship in India

Twitter accounts spoofing the Prime Minister of India such as "PM0India", "Indian-pm" and "PMOIndiaa" were blocked in India in August 2012 following violence in Assam.[5]

During the curfew in Jammu and Kashmir after Indian revocation of Jammu and Kashmir's special status on 5th August 2019, the Indian government approached Twitter to suspend accounts which were spreading rumours and anti-India content.[6] This included the Twitter account of Syed Ali Shah Geelani, a Kashmiri separatist leader.[7] On 3rd August 2019, Geelani tweeted "India is about to launch the biggest genocide in the history of mankind" to spread panic among masses and create hysteria, leading which, his account was suspended on request by authorities. Two days later, on August 5, the Indian parliament passed resolution to bifurcate the Jammu and Kashmir state into two union territories.[8]

Israel
Main article: Censorship in Israel

In 2016, access to comments by the American blogger Richard Silverstein about a criminal investigation, which involved a minor and therefore was under a gag order according to Israeli law, was blocked to Israeli IP addresses, following a request by Israel's Ministry of Justice.[9][10]

Pakistan
Main article: Internet censorship in Pakistan

As of May 2014, Twitter regularly disables the ability to view specific "tweets" inside Pakistan, at the request of the Government of Pakistan on the grounds that they are blasphemous, having done so five times in that month.[11]

On November 25, 2017, the NetBlocks internet shutdown observatory and Digital Rights Foundation collected evidence of nation-wide blocking of Twitter alongside other social media services, imposed by the government in response to the religious political party Tehreek-e-Labaik protests.[12][13][14] The technical investigation found that all major Pakistani fixed-line and mobile service providers were affected by the restrictions, which were lifted by the PTA the next day when protests abated following the resignation of Minister for Law and Justice Zahid Hamid.[15]

Russia

On May 19, 2014, Twitter blocked a pro-Ukrainian political account for Russian users. It happened soon after, a Russian official had threatened to ban Twitter entirely if it refused to delete "tweets" that violated Russian law, according to the Russian news site Izvestia.[16]

On July 27, 2014, Twitter blocked an account belonging to a hacker collective that has leaked several internal Kremlin documents to the Internet.[17]

South Korea
Main article: Internet censorship in South Korea

In August 2010, the Government of South Korea tried to block certain content on Twitter due to the North Korean government opening a Twitter account.[18] The North Korean Twitter account created on August 12, uriminzok, loosely translated to mean "our people" in Korean, acquired over 4,500 followers in less than one week. On August 19, 2010, South Korea's state-run Communications Standards Commission banned the Twitter account for broadcasting "illegal information."[19] According to BBC US and Canada, experts claim that North Korea has invested in "information technology for more than 20 years" with knowledge of how to use social networking sites.[20] This appears to be "nothing new" for North Korea as the reclusive country has always published propaganda in its press, usually against South Korea, calling them "warmongers."[20] With only 36 "tweets", the Twitter account was able to accumulate almost 9,000 followers. To date, the South Korean Commission has banned 65 sites, including this Twitter account.[19]

Turkey
Main article: Censorship in Turkey

On April 20, 2014, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, FAZ, reported Twitter had blocked two regime hostile accounts in Turkey, @Bascalan and @Haramzadeler333, both known for pointing out corruption.[21] In fact, on March 26, 2014, Twitter announced that it started to use its Country Withheld Content tool for the first time in Turkey.[22] As of June 2014, Twitter was withholding 14 accounts and "hundreds of tweets" in Turkey.[23]

Turkey submitted the highest volume of removal requests to Twitter in 2014,[24] 2015,[25][26] and 2016.[25]

Venezuela
Further information: Censorship in Venezuela and 2014 Venezuelan protests

Twitter images were temporarily blocked in Venezuela in February 2014,[27] along with other sites used to share images, including Pastebin.com and Zello, a walkie-talkie app.[28] In response to the block, Twitter offered Venezuelan users a workaround to use their accounts via text message on their mobile phones.[29]

On February 27, 2019, internet monitoring group NetBlocks reported the blocking of Twitter by state-run Internet provider CANTV for a duration of 40 minutes.[30][31] The disruption followed the sharing of a tweet made by opposition leader Juan Guaidó linking to a highly critical recording posted to SoundCloud, which was also restricted access during the incident. The outages were found to be consistent with a pattern of brief, targeted filtering of other social platforms established during the country's presidential crisis.[32]

Government blocking of Twitter access

In some cases, governments and other authorities take unilateral action to block Internet access to Twitter or its content.

As of 2019, the governments of China, Iran, North Korea, and Turkmenistan have blocked access to Twitter in those countries.

China
Main article: Internet censorship in China

Twitter is blocked in China; however, many Chinese people circumvent the block to use it.[33] Even major Chinese companies and national medias, such as Huawei and CCTV, use Twitter through a government approved VPN.[34][35] The official account of China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs started tweeting in English in December 2019, meanwhile dozens of Chinese diplomats, embassies and consulates run their accounts on twitter.[36] In 2010, Cheng Jianping was sentenced to one year in a labor camp for "retweeting" a comment that suggested boycotters of Japanese products should instead attack the Japanese pavilion at the 2010 Shanghai Expo. Her fiancé, who posted the initial comment, claims it was actually a satire of anti-Japanese sentiment in China.[37] According to the report of the Washington Post, in 2019, state security officials visited some users in China to request them deleting tweets.[38] The Chinese police would produce printouts of tweets and advise users to delete either the specific messages or their entire accounts. The New York Times described "the crackdown (of the twitter users in China) is unusually broad and punitive". The targets of the crackdown even included those Twitter lurkers with very few followers.[39] In 2019, a Chinese student at the University of Minnesota was arrested and sentenced to six months in prison when he returned to China, for posting tweets mocking Chinese paramount leader Xi Jinping while in US.[40] On 3 July 2020, Twitter announced that all data and information requests for Hong Kong authorities were immediately paused after Hong Kong national security law, which was imposed by the Chinese government, went into effect. [41]

Egypt (2011 temporary block)

Twitter was inaccessible in Egypt on January 25, 2011 during the 2011 Egyptian protests. Some news reports blamed the government of Egypt for blocking it.[42] Vodafone Egypt, Egypt's largest mobile network operator, denied responsibility for the action in a tweet.[43] Twitter's news releases did not state who the company believed instituted the block.[44] As of January 26, Twitter was still confirming that the service was blocked in Egypt.[45] On January 27, various reports claimed that access to the entire Internet from within Egypt had been shut down.[46]

Shortly after the Internet shutdown, engineers at Google, Twitter, and SayNow, a voice-messaging startup company acquired by Google in January, announced the Speak To Tweet service. Google stated in its official blog that the goal of the service was to assist Egyptian protesters in staying connected during the Internet shutdown.[47] Users could phone in a "tweet" by leaving a voicemail and use the Twitter hashtag #Egypt. These comments could be accessed without an Internet connection by dialing the same designated phone numbers. Those with Internet access could listen to the comments by visiting twitter.com/speak2tweet.

On February 2, 2011, connectivity was re-established by the four main Egyptian service providers.[48][49][50] A week later, the heavy filtering that occurred at the height of the revolution had ended.

Iran
Main article: Internet censorship in Iran

In 2009, during 2009 Iranian presidential election, the Iranian government blocked Twitter due to fear of protests being organised.[51] In September 2013, the blocking of both Twitter and Facebook was briefly lifted without notice due to a technical error, however, within a day the sites were blocked again.[52]

North Korea
Main article: Internet in North Korea

In April 2016, North Korea started to block Twitter "in a move underscoring its concern with the spread of online information".[53] Anyone trying to access it, such as foreign visitors, even with special permission from the North Korean government, is subject to punishment.[53]

Turkey (2014 temporary block)
Main article: Censorship in Turkey

On March 21, 2014, access to Twitter in Turkey was temporarily blocked, after a court ordered that "protection measures" be applied to the service. This followed earlier remarks by Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan who vowed to "wipe out Twitter" following damaging allegations of corruption in his inner circle.[54] However, on March 27, 2014, Istanbul Anatolia 18th Criminal Court of Peace suspended the above-mentioned court order. Turkey's constitutional court later ruled that the ban is illegal.[55] Two weeks after the Turkish government blocked the site, the Twitter ban was lifted.[56] However, as of 2017, Twitter reports that the government of Turkey accounts for more than 52 percent of all content removal requests worldwide.[57]

Turkmenistan

As of 2018, foreign news and opposition websites are blocked in Turkmenistan, and international social networks such as Twitter are "often inaccessible".[58]

United Kingdom (2011 threat of temporary block)
Main article: Internet censorship in the United Kingdom

Then-Prime Minister David Cameron threatened to shut down Twitter among other social networking sites for the duration of the 2011 England riots,[59] but no action was taken.

Suspending and restricting users
Main articles: Deplatforming and Twitter suspensions

Under the Terms of Service that Twitter requires its users to agree to, Twitter retains the right to temporarily or permanently suspend user accounts based on a violation of the agreement.[60] One such example took place on December 18, 2017, when it banned the accounts belonging to Paul Golding, Jayda Fransen, Britain First, and the Traditionalist Worker Party.. More recently, Donald Trump, the 45th President of the United States, has faced a limited degree of censorship.[61][62] Trump has used the platform extensively for communication with the country, and has escalated tensions with other nations through his tweets.[63]

Twitter's policies have been described as subject to manipulation by users who may coordinate to flag politically controversial tweets as allegedly violating the platform's policies, resulting in deplatforming of controversial users.[60] The platform has long been criticized for its failure to provide details of underlying alleged policy violations to the subjects of Twitter suspensions and bans.[64]

In 2018, Twitter rolled out a "quality filter" that hid content and users deemed "low quality" from search results and limited their visibility, leading to accusations of shadow banning. After conservatives claimed it censors users from the political right, Alex Thompson, a writer for VICE, confirmed that many prominent Republican politicians had been "shadow banned" by the filter.[65] Twitter later acknowledged the problem, stating that the filter had a software bug that would be fixed in the near future.[65]

gollark: That is an uncharacteristically formally written thing for you, hm.
gollark: It's much easier to indoctrinate your own children than other people's, see.
gollark: Negative utilitarianism bad, yes.
gollark: It does to some extent. Without this, it is not meaningful and everywhere has "freedom of speech" because you're physically capable of saying things even if you're immediately imprisoned for it.
gollark: Desmos can do ALL things.

See also

References
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