Viewpoint: Twitter outcry testament to social media's sheep-mentality

"#socialsuicide"

That’s what many critics are calling Twitter’s announcement on Friday that they will soon enforce country-specific censorship on tweets.

The news came as a blow to many political dissidents throughout the world.

“Dear Twitter, I face so much censorship in Sudan as a journalist, you were my free and safe space. I'm grieving now,” wrote Reem Shawkat, a Sudanese journalist, on his Twitter on Jan. 27.

Others responded with anger, prompting many users to implement a “Twitter black-out” on Saturday in hopes of the site rescinding its decision.

Twitter soon became filled with melodrama fit for a junior-high hallway. Accusations of the Orwellian future of “Big Brother” were slung left and right. People deleted their accounts. Many said Twitter had dug its own grave.

However, these reactions were just that -- melodrama.

If anyone had taken the time to actually read the statement released by Twitter instead of feeding into the instant-information sensation that is social media, they would have realized the policy isn’t so egregious as everyone made it out to be.

Here’s what Twitter had to say about the changes Thursday on their blog:

“As we continue to grow internationally, we will enter countries that have different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression. Some differ so much from our ideas that we will not be able to exist there. Others are similar but, for historical or cultural reasons, restrict certain types of content, such as France or Germany, which ban pro-Nazi content. Until now, the only way we could take account of those countries’ limits was to remove content globally.”

But now, Twitter has a new approach:

“Starting today, we give ourselves the ability to reactively withhold content from users in a specific country — while keeping it available in the rest of the world,” wrote the site.

That means if a journalist in Sudan, for example, posts a tweet that is illegal in their country, it will be taken down from Sudanese accounts and remain visible elsewhere.

Of course, it is not an ideal policy. Twitter was a vital tool in last year’s Egyptian revolution. People used tweets to gather crowds together for demonstrations, and if the protestors tweets had been pulled in Egypt, it would have been meaningless that they were still visible in London or Tokyo. It is fair to speculate that Twitter’s new policy would have rendered the Egyptian revolution downright impossible.

But, the reality is that censorship happens. Twitter was already censoring many things before Friday, like child porn and phishing scams. It happens everywhere, not just North Korea and China.

For the most part, Friday’s policy improved their old policy, letting the majority of the world see things that would have completely disappeared otherwise.

The outcry and vitriol seen in the days following Twitter’s announcement were a testament to the sheep-mentality that permeates social media. One person deems it an assault on liberty, various nuances of the same tweet spread, blog posts are hastily thrown together, and suddenly, Twitter is said to have committed #socialsuicide.

Emily Atteberry is a Spring 2012 Paste BN Collegiate Correspondent. Learn more about her here.

This story originally appeared on the Paste BN College blog, a news source produced for college students by student journalists. The blog closed in September of 2017.