San Francisco - Free speech activists are calling for a boycott of Twitter Saturday to protest the site's new tools that will allow it to redact tweets on a country-by-country basis.
Twitter announced the new capability in a blog posting Thursday, saying it could now 'reactively withhold content from users in a specific country - while keeping it available in the rest of the world.'
'As we continue to grow internationally, we will enter countries that have different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression,' it read, citing as examples France and Germany, which ban pro-Nazi content.
Twitter said it would post a notice of a redacted tweet in any country affected and that the censored tweets would appear in their entirety everywhere else.
Along with other social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter is credited with playing an important role in helping activists organize anti-government protests throughout the Middle East in 2011.
Reporters Without Borders, in a letter to Twitter chief executive James Dorsey, urged him to reverse the decision, which it said 'restricts freedom of expression and runs counter to the movements opposed to censorship that have been linked to the Arab Spring, in which Twitter served as a sounding board.
'By finally choosing to align itself with the censors, Twitter is depriving cyber dissidents in repressive countries of a crucial tool for information and organization.'
Activists fear that the new capability will curtail that influence and using the tag #twitterblackout called for the site to be boycotted Saturday.
Many people posted comments on the site in Arabic on Friday. 'I will not tweet on Saturday January 28,' posted Ahmed Al Shaifan. 'Be with us to support #FreedomOfSpeech.'
US civil liberties group DemandProgress blasted the move, calling on followers to sign an open protest letter to Twitter.
'Twitter's importance as an open platform has been demonstrated time and again this year,' the letter said. 'We need you to keep fighting for and enabling freedom of expression - not rationalize away totalitarianism as a legitimate 'different idea'.'
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