Twitter Planning to Adopt Technological Ways to Stop the 140-Character Censor

Twitter is looking into ways to stop the site coming under the same censorship problems as Google and hopes to make itself completely non-sanitized. According to widespread reports, Twitter is trying to stop its service being censored or blocked by foreign governments such as those of Iran and China.

According to Chief Executive Evan Williams, who was speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Twitter will take the stance of not trying to reason with the censor but carry on regardless.

“We are partially blocked in China and other places and we were in Iran as well,” Evans said to journalists at the event.

“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.” Williams is quoted as saying in the International Business Times.

Williams added that the wide range of distribution streams on which Twitter can run, including syndication sites and mobile applications, means that the site has a better chance of evading government censorship than single sites. It should be noted that last year Twitter was used heavily to organize rebellion (was used in reporting first-hand post-election oppression in Iran).

Technological ways

There was no news on just how Twitter would evade the censors, but as the Iran Elections showed freedom of speech via Twitter was paramount to the way the election was perceived in the western media. Williams said he did not want to give details of the changes, but said he was hopeful for “technological ways” to thwart censorship and to blind-side the censors. Maybe he can let Google know just what he means by this.

The company’s stance also underlines the growing concerns of western organizations and governments about the Chinese government’s attitude to web censorship. The debates comes on the heels of a declaration from Google that it would discontinue to censor search results in China, following allegations of cyber-attacks origination from the country.