Hasta La Creative!

In a new investigation headlined “An Inside Look at the Accounts Twitter Has Censored in Countries Around the World,” BuzzFeed says it has “has identified more than 1,700 Twitter accounts that have been blocked in at least one country” following requests from “national groups and governments.”

The report by Craig Silverman and Jeremy Singer-Vine, published this morning, notes that Twitter regularly issues a “transparency report in which it shares the number of requests received from different governments” but it doesn’t release a list of the “specific accounts it has muzzled.” So BuzzFeed built its own dataset, which it just released as a Google Sheets spreadsheetnoting that not all of the accounts are still “withheld,” to use Twitter’s term, while others have been removed entirely. The spreadsheet covers accounts “observed to have been withheld at some point in at least one of seven countriesGermany, France, Turkey, Russia, the United Kingdom, Brazil, and Indiabetween October 2017 and early January 2018.”

What you may not have realized until now is that it’s possible for a specific Twitter account to be blocked in a specific country but still remain accessible to users in other countries. Twitter’s ability to turn the visibility of individual accounts on and off on a country-by-country basis is one way that it attempts to comply with laws around the world. Silverman and Jeremy Singer-Vine write that their analysis offers “an unprecedented glimpse into Twitter’s collaboration with national groups and governmentsdemocratic and authoritarian alikeand provides a stark reminder of Twitter’s ability to shape political conversations, and of governments’ attempts to influence that process.”

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