Twitter heads defend new censorship policy

Twitter heads are defending the company’s new censorship policy, which was announced last week. Executive Chairman and co-Founder Jack Dorsey said that the new censorship policy will not harm Twitter’s ability for change and that, if anything, “it actually censors less” reports TechCrunch.

The new policy allows Twitter to withhold content from users in a specific country. Before now the social network’s only option was to remove the content globally.

Dorsey was speaking in an interview after accepting an award for Biggest Social Impact on behalf of Twitter at the Crunchies.

In the interview says that only alternative to its new policy would be “global” censorship of the entire site in certain countries. This policy allows Twitter to be transparent when an individual tweet has been hidden rather than an entire country’s.

Twitter CEO, Dick Costolo has also defended the policy saying that the company is not proactively monitoring tweets, reports The Wall Street Journal.

“There’s been no change in our stance … in respect to content on Twitter,” said Costolo

He explained that Twitter will only respond to requests from governments but the tweets will be left up for the rest of the world, reports the Journal. In place of the pulled tweet will be a message that the content was removed at the request of the local government.

Costolo says that Twitter is trying to handle the situation in “the most honest, transparent and forward-looking way. You can’t reside in countries and not operate within the law.”

Below is a full video of Dorsey’s interview.