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Twitter has announced that it’s going to start censor tweets or entire accounts if the law in a certain country will require. Although any kind of censorship is wrong as the people should have the right to express themselves, some countries like Germany and France are censoring pro-nazi content.

The micro-blogging service will not begin censoring users at will, it’s going to do so in a process familiar to what Google is doing on its search engine. If the law requires it, then Google will remove a result from its search engine, however, the user will be informed why the result has been removed using ChillingEffects.org.

So far, Twitter didn’t have the ability to remove certain tweets in certain countries and it was forced to remove it entirely from all countries. Now that Twitter can delete a tweet only in a certain country or area, and the others users will know why the company decided to take it out.

A blog post said that Twitter wants to be as transparent as possible, and will communicate with its users through Chilling Effects just like Google is doing right now. If you are in Germany and you are searching for something regarding nazi content, then many results will not appear, but instead will be welcomed by an alert which explains why the content has been removed.

Currently, Twitter has censored tweets only after receiving US DMCA complaints. This happened because some users were posting links to pirated material like movies or songs.

Even if the Twitter will remove certain tweets in certain countries, if someone makes a legit request that is protected by the US law, those certain tweets will be removed globally, and they won’t show up no matter where you are.

This means that if Twitter receives a complaint in Germany, it will hide the tweet from the view of German users. A notification will be displayed on the bottom of the page which will say that Twitter users outside Germany can still view the tweet.

According to the micro-blogging service, everything will be related to a user’s IP, but the new page of country settings will help the users better understand what is happening. Twitter is aware that the users will try to override the new settings through different means like proxy websites.

If you thought that this is related to piracy, then you have been wrong because, like said, Twitter can already remove the tweets which fall under the US DMCA law. This is about China, Germany, France, and many other countries which ban certain content like nazi stuff. Let’s just hope that Twitter will not abuse its power, and start banning users for nothing.