Cultural issues force Twitter to censor tweets in some countries

Twitter has announced that it in certain countries it will remove tweets from users' feeds while keeping them visible in other countries.

According to Twitter's company blog, the move is to ensure it does not offend other countries' cultural and legal sensibilities.

"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."

Although Twitter said on Thursday that it had not yet started doing this, it wanted to "give ourselves the ability to reactively withhold content from users in a specific country - while keeping it available in the rest of the world. We have also built in a way to communicate transparently to users when content is withheld, and why."