As so it is; Twitter will now censor tweets based on censorship laws of the country the user is in. Now before you think this is only bad news for those people who live in repressive resigned, keep in mind there was a proposal by Joe Lieberman to have Twitter delete the accounts in order to “eliminate violent Islamist extremism propaganda” on social media.  And then we just went though this whole PIPA SOPA mess.

Still, I think it will be immediate embraced and enforced in the country of the most likely suspects. As we have seen during the Twitter revolution and the Arab spring, Twitter is already world wide and having an impact, so much so some of the more repressive reserves could block Twitter out all together. So to keep markets open, they needed to adapt the line that different countries have “different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression”. Shame.

But before you go off on Twitter, keep in mind Google and other search engines have been doing this for years with China being the most visible example. So I guess its just a sign of the times.  As social media matures; it becomes more powerful. As it becomes more powerful, it becomes a threat to the power holders.  As bad as it sounds, I somehow take comfort in knowing people are connecting and its providing an impact, else this policy would have never been pushed in the first place.