In late January, Scott Baldauf, 46, was sitting in front of his desktop computer at the headquarters of the Christian Science Monitor in Boston, monitoring Twitter as usual, looking for breaking news and story ideas about Africa, a continent where he worked for years as the Monitor’s chief correspondent. Suddenly, hundreds of tweets popped on his computer screen, all in one subject: Twitter’s new censorship policy.

Baldauf was shocked. For several years in Africa, from Kenya to South Africa and from Sudan to Mali, he has been accustomed to the free Twitter where he could always trust that someone would break some interesting news. “As a journalist, it has become one of my preferred methods of following the news as it breaks,” Baldauf said. “I can always count on someone to tweet a news event.”

Andrew Couts believes Twitter's new censorship policy could be good for journalists. (Photo courtesy of Jennifer McLain.)

Twitter has long been regarded as an ideal platform for freedom of speech, especially for journalists. But on Jan. 26, Twitter suddenly announced a new censorship policy that essentially enables the world’s largest microblog company to withhold future illegal tweets requested by governments, case by case, within a specific country, and to publish such requests on a third-party website called Chilling Effects. This new policy immediately set fire to a worldwide online debate that led to a boycott under the hashtag #TwitterBlackout on Jan. 28.

Like Baldauf, many journalists have concerns with how the policy could thwart the free flow of unofficial news. Some believe the exposure of the requests may actually draw more attention to the silenced. Some see this as an outcome of compromise that benefits every side. But all in all, journalists tend to view the new policy as Twitter’s compromise with governments that use censorship to control the flow of information.

“At this point, I am still not happy with the decision, and with the overall direction of social media toward greater control.” Baldauf said. “It could be a harder hit for ordinary citizens, who suddenly began to have a non-official source of information, and will just as suddenly have that source taken away from them.”

“My greater concern is that several authoritarian regimes on the African continent — such as Ethiopia, Uganda or Zimbabwe, which jail journalists on charges of treason — may follow the lead of Iran and China and either ban Twitter outright or restrict it so severely that it effectively ceases to be an effective venue for information,” Baldauf said.

There are journalists who are looking at the brighter side too. When Andrew Couts, staff writer at Digital Trends, a high-tech news website, noticed the news, he rushed to Twitter to check what the masses were saying. The result surprised him.

“I saw an endless stream of outrage pouring out from the tweeting public — outrage that ran perpendicular to my understanding of the story,” Couts recalled. Stimulated, he went further and wrote an article to rebut the angry crowd, in which he claimed, “Saturday’s Twitter blackout is nothing more than ignorant overreaction, a misguided flurry of righteous indignation that ignores the facts.”

“Why are people protesting Twitter for a good policy?” Couts said. “More people should know what the policy really is. They want Twitter to sacrifice its business expansion for the freedom of speech. It’s not right. I don’t see Twitter’s policy acting as much of a deterrent — there is little consequence to having a tweet censored. It might even make the tweet better known if a government chooses to censor particular speech, and the media picks up on it.”

Even so, Couts, both in his work and in his life, tends to be very cautious and self-restricted about what to tweet. “Anyone can go back and see what you’ve said, and use that information however they please,” Couts said. “It is widely known and reported that U.S. law enforcement (FBI, CIA and even local police) actively monitor Twitter and public Facebook posts to help with investigations, or discover illegal activity. That should give everyone — even those who don’t break the law — pause.”

Mireille Raad, a freelance programmer and activist from Lebanon, said, “Everyone wins and no one suffers, since it’s hard to implement this on a large scale. But again, there is a moral loss for freedom of speech and activists.”

Raad and five other friends co-founded an initiative to improve the Internet situation in Lebanon — they used the hashtag #ontornet, which is a play on Arabic language between Internet and WaitingNet. Raad said that some Lebanese newspapers started using this word whenever they wanted to refer to slow Internet.

In response to various concerns over the new policy, Twitter emphasized its “reactive” censorship,” meaning that specific tweets would be taken down only when the government requested it, and the request was deemed by Twitter as legitimate through “legal analysis,” as Alex Macgillivray, general counsel of Twitter, put it.

Meanwhile, the censored tweet will remain visible to users outside that country, and all users will be notified of the take-down request on Chilling Effects. Twitter explained that in the past, once it was forced to delete a tweet, it would disappear globally.

“The worst-case scenario would be that people in democratic countries with tough libel laws might have difficulty using Twitter to criticize public figures or companies.” said Rebecca MacKinnon, former CNN Beijing bureau chief who recently published a book on Internet freedom, “Consent of the Networked.” “I think if the policy came out when I was still writing the book I would say that Twitter should join the Global Network Initiative so that there will be a process to independently verify the promises it is making about its new censorship system.”

Email: mc3521@columbia.edu