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Twitter-country takedown notices: developments in France and Germany

Maria Serena Ciaburri, July 15, 2013

Abstract: On January 26, 2012, Twitter announced on its blog the "country withheld content" function: the possibility to withhold a single tweet in a specific country.

Before that day, when the subject of a tweet was reported to Twitter as inappropriate, and Twitter chose to take action, the tweet was removed from Twitter globally. But in this way there was a problem in choosing which parameters should be followed to judge if a tweet was appropriate or not. A tweet written in Germany can be seen in America as in Russia, in Italy as in Netherlands and every country has its rules about freedom of expression. Which rules should be followed? By creating this new functionality, Twitter was trying to respect each country's rules. Naturally, Twitter doesn't have the ability to monitor every single tweet (because there are millions in a day) and act pre-emptively, but there is the opportunity for users to report a violation allowing Twitter to act a posteriori . A tweet can be deleted after a lawful report and, since the beginning of 2012, a single tweet can also be removed only in a specific country. As shown in the blogpost published in January, every takedown notice that is sent to Twitter is also forwarded to the Chilling Effects' database as a guarantee of transparency. The censored tweet is replaced by the writing: "This Tweet from @Username has been withheld in: Country. Learn more" while the censored account is replaced by a similar message: "@Username withheld. This account has been withheld in: Country. Learn more".

With the aim of analyzing the effects and the repercussions of this new functionality, we examined all of Twitter's "Country Withheld Content" notices in Chilling Effects' database. These notices come from Russia, Germany, Netherlands, France, Japan and India, and vary in their topics depending on the country. We discuss here only France and Germany.

Chilling Effects received two takedown notices from France about racist and anti-Semitic tweets. The first one comes from SOS Homophobie, the French national association against the homophobic discriminations and aggressions. This association was formed in 1994 and acts in everyday life and online to fight these kind of prejudges. The second notice comes from the UEJF, l'Union des Etudiantes Juif de France, and is related to a famous and very public case. The UEJF is an organization to support Jewish Students in France and on October 23, 2012, it has sent a notice about anti-Semitic tweets. As it is possible to read in the notice, the violations committed are: the offense of public racial insult, the offense of public provocation to discrimination and the offense of public defamation racial. It was created on Tweeter the hashtag #unbonjuif, followed by #siJetaisNazi, #unbonnoir and #unjuifmort. After the notice, the UEJF asked Twitter information about users that posted anti-Semitic statements, but the microblogging site refused, appealing to the First Amendment. According to Alexandra Neri, the Tweeter's attorney, "Twitter doesn't try to hide himself behind American law or non-application of French law. In this complex situation, where we cannot have a clear answer which laws apply and we have to compromise". Twitter's defense was that the requested data were on the USA servers in San Francisco, so they were protected by American laws. On January 24, 2013, The Tribunal des Grande Instance of Paris decided that Twitter must procure all the data asked from the UEJF and that the social network must create an alert system to report violations.

With respect to Germany, Chilling Effects has received three of Twitter's country-specific notices. The first one was about the closure of the Bresseres Hannover's account. Bresseres Hannover is a neo-Nazi association banned by the Ministry of the Interior of the State of Lower-Saxony for racial hatred. This was the first Twitter country-specific action, as reported also by The Huffington Post on October 18, 2012. The other notice about the same topic was sent from Judgendschutz, an organization that has the aim to promote the protection of minors. Also in this case, there was the request to close an account related to a neo-Nazi banned association. The third notice comes from the Bundesminiserium des Innern (the German home office) and was about a Salafist organization called Dawa FFM.

It seems that while in France there are associations that are looking for specific tweets, in Germany the country-specific censorship is only used to close whole accounts related to banned associations. In fact, there are no requests for single tweets or direct researches on the site, but they are all consequence of non-online researches.

Chilling Effects has received fewer than 20 Twitter-country notices in 18 months. However, Twitter's problem with regulating its content globally according to different national laws about freedom of expression is likely still not solved. Given that Twitter is a global social network and the sheer number of tweets every day, it seems likely that there are many violations that are not reported. In addition to that, we cannot say that this is the best way to solve this problem and, most of all, we cannot say that this problem has a real solution.
As we saw for the French issue, the problems associated to freedom of expression are still evident. About this, there are different opinions: for some people Twitter's move is an attack against freedom of expression, while for some others it is a way to better support this principle. This last one was the purpose of the heading of the blogpost mentioned above: "Tweets still must flow". It was referred to the old blogpost "The tweets must flow" that introduced Twitter's position about freedom of expression. David Drummond (Google's chief legal officer) thinks that Twitter is trying to deal with different laws in different countries and that is not easy to do. He said : "I think what they (Twitter officials) are wrestling with is what all of us wrestle with - and everyone wants to focus on China, but it is actually a global issue - which is laws in these different countries vary. Americans tend to think copyright is a real bad problem, so we have to regulate that on the Internet. In France and Germany, they care about Nazis' issues and so forth. (...) In China, there are other issues that we call censorship. And so how you respect all the laws or follow all the laws to the extent you think they should be followed while still allowing people to get the content elsewhere?". It's a real complex situation that has to take in account not only laws, but even background, history, culture and habits of each country. It's normal that someone doesn't agree with it. It's a test.
As the EFF's Jillian York says: "Let's be clear: This is censorship. There's no way around that. But alas, Twitter is not above the law. I understand why people are angry, but this does not, in my view, represent a sea change in Twitter's policies. Twitter has previously taken down content-for DMCA requests, at least-and will no doubt continue to face requests in the future. I believe that the company is doing its best in a tough situation...and I'll be the first to raise hell if they screw up."

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