Twitter is challenging to the freedom of expression during its expanding into different countries.
In 2011, it said "The Tweets Must Flow" when being asked to release some user information to the US government; in 2012, it said "Tweets still must flow" when trying to withheld tweets in some other countries; in 2013, I guess it would say "Tweets Will Always Flow" when entering China.
The following will show you how the tweets will look like during the challenges:
1. Tweets must flow
When a tweet is removed for a "legal reason"(such as DMCA), it won’t be exist on the Twitter website any more, and you can’t read it wherever you are.
For those tweets removed because of DMCA, you can see the reasonable requests on the Chilling Effects website.
2. Tweets still must flow
When a tweet is withheld for a country reason (such as religion), it won’t be seen in that country only, but not the rest of the world.
I have no dear how Twitter will do that technically, but people in that country I think can also see the withheld tweet by visiting its webpage with VPN or Proxy, which will hide their real IP addresses so that Twitter can’t tell where they are from.
And for the tweets withheld for a country request, you can also see the reasons on the Chilling Effects website as said by Twitter.
3. Tweets will always flow
In case that Twitter did enter China, it would find out that it was impossible to remove or withhold any tweets in a transparent and technical way as what they can do now, since there wouldn’t be any written reasons, but just some phone calls. So there won’t be anything to be seen on Chilling Effects, but an obscure reason on the Twitter error page.
As a result, Twitter would have to hire many employees to manually remove the "sensitive" tweets just as what Sina, Sohu, Tencent and all the other Chinese microblogging websites are doing. Otherwise, it would have to leave China as what Google has already done.
As you can see from the above, Twitter is just following Google to deal with the freedom of expression, so the tweets will always flow, as long as no one to "Occupy Twitter".
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