Twitter’s Speech Problem: Hashtags and Hate

Most of Twitter’s two hundred million users tweet from outside of the United States, and so the company bumps, uncomfortably and unavoidably, into other countries’ free-speech laws.

Last January, Twitter announced a new “country-withheld content” policy, under which it will block an account at the request of a government, but only within that country’s borders, so the tweet could still be seen elsewhere around the world—an attempt to find a Bay Area–sunny middle ground between freedom of speech and compliance with local law. But free speech means something very different abroad—even in friendly, seemingly similar-to-us countries like France. (This is true particularly when it comes to the kind of speech that just happens to be in question: anti-Semitic speech.) When Twitter instated its “country-withheld content” policy, it broke open the floodgates.