Tweeter Censorship } It’s Always About Money Regardless

In 2009, Twitter inspired protesters in Moldova to demand political power. In 2010, the microblogging service channeled food, medical supplies and hope to the desperate victims of the earthquake in Haiti. Last year, that little blue bird did no less than foment revolution across the Arab world while uniting Americans against corporate greed and inequality.

And this year? Twitter’s helping France and Turkey clamp down on free speech without inconveniencing users in other countries.

That’s the thrust of the company’s announcement Thursday that it will accommodate “countries that have different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression” by selectively blocking tweets at their request. While Twitter could always delete tweets if it needed to, now it can and will censor them on a country-by-country basis to comply with national laws such as  the bans on pro-Nazi speech in Germany and France.

That’s the example Twitter offered, and it’s a pretty convenient one. Who’s going to side with the Nazis? But there are plenty of other, less-palatable laws Twitter is now in a position to enforce, like Thailand’s ban on anything deemed insulting to the king, or Turkey’s similar prohibition on defaming its national founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Speaking of Turkey, it outlaws any discussion of the Armenian genocide, while France just passed a bill making it a crime to deny the genocide happened. So now Twitter can, in theory, be asked to observe both laws.

Absurd, yes, but hardly unprecedented. Google already blocks search results and other content in a number of countries around the globe for similar reasons. But it’s different when it’s Twitter. Google only promises not to be evil (and some critics say it’s now failing to clear even that low bar.) Twitter’s devotees have built it up into something much more exalted: a force for global progress and human enlightenment. Anyone who bought into that narrative can’t help but feel disappointed and betrayed.

Of course, it was never fully true, but that didn’t stop Twitter’s leaders from stoking the myth. In a blog post published a year ago headlined “The Tweets Must Flow,” they proclaimed, “We don’t always agree with the things people choose to tweet, but we keep the information flowing irrespective of any view we may have about the content.”

That post was signed by Twitter co-founder Biz Stone and Alex Macgillivray, the company’s general counsel. The one published yesterday announcing the policy change was unsigned. That tells you pretty much everything you need to know.

Jeff Bercovici, Forbes Staff