Twitter: from free speech champion to selective censor?
Originally published on 09 September 2014
The social network’s response to the Foley footage and images is clearly a break from that response: not only did the network respond to reports complaining about posts using the material, they also seem to have proactively sought it out in other instances.
And yet there is not a universal consensus on the use of the images, as was reflected by the New York Post and New York Daily News’ decision to use graphic stills from the footage as their front-page splashes. Here begin the problems for Twitter: the network decided not to ban or suspend either outlet for sharing the images — despite banning other users for doing the same.
Twitter has not been nearly as eager to enter the content policing game in other situations. Like many other major companies, Twitter has long insisted it is not a publisher but a platform.
A quagmire, which Twitter has gotten themselves into, indeed.
But China, like always, begs to differ come the Western (or worldly) ways of censorship.
Kinny tweets aviation, social media and technology on Twitter.
