Twitter lets Turkey blur tweets

Twitter and Turkey have agreed that unwanted tweets will be ‘blocked’ with pixelation. The decision follows a blockade of Twitter in Turkey and is intended to prevent a new blockade. Twitter has long allowed countries to censor tweets.

The Turkish telecom watchdog would be allowed to select tweets that have been banned by the court as a result of the agreement, after which Twitter censors them, writes an English-language Turkish newspaper. Twitter messages could then be partially or completely blocked. Twitter users will not see the message, but they do know that Twitter prevents them from seeing a message.

Twitter and Turkey have been at odds lately; Twitter refused to block messages that the Turkish government found undesirable, after which Turkey decided to ban users from access to the microblogging service. Twitter is now available again, and the offending tweets have been deleted.

Twitter has been offering countries the option to block Twitter messages for some time now. In addition, users see it if a message is not shown, for the sake of transparency. As far as we know, however, this is the first time that Twitter has used pixelation of tweets.

This is what Twitter could look like in Turkey