Is Twitter Going To Start Blocking “Gay” Tweets In Anti-LGBT Countries?

Twitter has announcedthat it now has “the ability to reactively withhold content from users in a specific country—while keeping it available in the rest of the world.”

Essentially, if a specific country does not allow certain types of expression (Twitter uses the example of pro-Nazi content in France and Germany), it can request that a tweet be blocked to users within that country. It will still show up in Twitter feds elsewhere around the world. Previously, Twitter could only block tweets on a global level.

While it seems that Twitter intends to use this policy in good faith, questions are already being raised about whether anti-gay states in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East would use the new system to censor words like “gay” or other LGBT-related terms from their Twitter lexicon.  Read More