If there has been a theme on the internet for January, it has been censorship. In fact it is fast growing into one of the biggest issues in general on the web these days. Recently we have seen the winding down of Megaupload, the SOPA protests and similar moves by governments in countries all over the world. Last year, we had Wikileaks and the super injunctions in the UK. Privacy and what we share online is the hot topic.

Last night Twitter announced that they were adding the ability to censor tweets in certain countries. It’s a move that is Twitter clearly bowing to “legal repercussions” written all over it and it is sure to provoke a backlash. Twitter are themselves trying to wrap it in a positive light with a blog post titled “the tweets must flow”, but no matter how they dress this up there is still the possibility that any one of us could be censored by the social network that has probably done the most for free speech around the world.

You only have to read this part of the blog post to see just how far ranging the powers are that Twitter are granting themselves…

Until now, the only way we could take account of those countries’ limits was to remove content globally. 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. We have also built in a way to communicate transparently to users when content is withheld, and why.

The technology allows Twitter to remove the tweets by IP address and they have claimed that they will be as transparent as possible when they remove content.

While people are going to have to take Twitter’s word on the fact that they want to keep the content flowing, I am going to remain sceptical. Would the uprising in Egypt have been shut down under this new rule? Would Twitter have come under huge pressure about the super injunctions last year and removed all that content?

The simple truth is that this is money speaking here and Twitter are treading very carefully from a legal perspective. They started off as the great new medium for free speech that provoked revolutions and overthrew dictators but while they claim they have good intentions with this move Twitter really died a little last night with this launch. Yes it is true, Twitter are now censoring tweets