After years of touting itself as a champion of free expression on the Internet, Twitter Inc. on Friday touched off a torrent of criticism after it announced it can now remove messages from the online service within specific countries if asked to do so.

A backlash from Twitter users and free-speech advocates came one day after the micro-blogging service announced the change, noting that it is bound to enter “countries that have different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression.”

The San Francisco-based company, whose website allows people to broadcast short messages called “tweets,” didn’t specify particular countries it planned to enter, but noted that countries such as France and Germany restrict pro-Nazi content.

After Twitter’s policy announcement, thousands of people who use the service in English, German, Arabic and other languages called for a one-day boycott, starting on Saturday.

“Twitter starts deleting tweets, I stop posting tweets,” said Matthew Wallace of Wake Forest, N.C., in a tweet on Friday. “Join the #twitterblackout tomorrow!” he wrote.

Reporters Without Borders, a group that supports free speech and journalists worldwide, also urged Twitter to reverse its decision. “By finally choosing to align itself with the censors, Twitter is depriving cyberdissidents in repressive countries of a crucial tool for information and organization,” wrote Olivier Basille, the group’s director. “Are you going to block tweets about the demands of Turkey’s Kurdish minority? Will Russian Internet users see their criticisms of the government censored?” he asked.

A spokesman for Twitter declined to comment. Twitter said it would only take down tweets if a request to do so comes from “an authorized entity,” and that it would notify people whose tweets have been removed.

The news of Twitter’s move sent shockwaves among its users, in part because the company stance as a defender of free expression. Dick Costolo, its chief executive, has said Twitter is “the free speech wing of the free speech party.” One year ago, revolutionaries in Egypt used Twitter and other social-media websites to organize protests that eventually brought down the government. During the Egyptian revolution, the company wrote on its blog post that “we strive not to remove Tweets on the basis of their content.”

Twitter said its new policy would not be a solution for all situations.

Some countries “differ so much from our ideas that we will not be able to exist there,” the company’s announcement stated, in an implicit reference to countries such as China that have blocked Twitter.

Before the change, Twitter said it could only respond to government requests by removing messages entirely from its global network. “Starting today, we give ourselves the ability to reactively withhold content from users in a specific country—while keeping it available in the rest of the world,” the company said in a blog post late Thursday.

Twitter has more than 100 million active accounts, 70% of them located outside the U.S. Its move underscores the long-running dilemmas faced by U.S. Internet companies—including Google Inc. and Facebook Inc.—that have been in favor of unfettered free speech but must make compromises in order to do business globally.

In many ways, Twitter’s policy on how it will handle government censorship requests is line with its peers, particularly Google’s, said Rebecca MacKinnon, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, a nonpartisan think tank, and author of “Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom.”

Google developed a policy of complying with local laws and informing its website visitors that content has been removed because of official take-down requests, and it publishes a report on the number of requests it faces in specific countries. Even with such a policy, from time to time the company has been accused of violating local laws by officials in Italy, Brazil and elsewhere.

Google had operated in China for four years while cooperating with censorship requirements before making the controversial decision two years ago to cease censorship in the country and move its Chinese-language Web search service to Hong Kong.

“Twitter is growing up, expanding into other countries and recognizing that the Internet is contrary to what people hoped; the government does reach into the Internet,” Ms. MacKinnon said. “It’s reasonable to expect they would protect their employees,” she said.

The similarities with Google are no accident. Twitter’s general counsel, Alex Macgillivray, is a former Google lawyer who helped craft some censorship-related policies there.

As companies like Twitter broaden their reach and try to generate revenue outside the U.S., they must increasingly tweak the way they operate to suit new cultures. While authoritarian countries such as China pose well-known challenges for Internet companies, companies like Google, Facebook and Yahoo Inc. have had to learn that even democracies such as India, for instance, can be fraught with complications because companies must help the government pull down offending online material in order to maintain “public order, decency or morality.”

Twitter, created in 2006, is used by many people to get the latest news about a variety of topics and people, from sports to world affairs. The company recently established an office in the U.K. and hopes to become an online-advertising powerhouse like Google, meaning it will have to put boots on the ground in some of the world’s top Internet markets. If it doesn’t comply with local laws, its employees could face legal action or prosecution.

Earlier this year, Chrome still had a fair way to catch up to Firefox’s userbase. Meanwhile, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer was holding out strong as the preferred browser on the internet. These stats are changing fast.

This month, StatCounter suggests that Chrome has finally stolen second place from Firefox if viewed on a global scale. Chrome usage has been growing steadily throughout the year, while Firefox usage has seen a gradual decline since around midway through this year. Internet Explorer has also seen a general downward trend that suggests that Chrome’s user growth is largely due to users switching from the other two browsers.
StatCounter Global Stats are fairly reliable, since they are based on aggregate data collected on a sample exceeding 15-billion page views per month (4-billion from the US) from the StatCounter network of more than three million websites. After having a quick look around at some of the other stats sites, it looks like they’re pretty spot-on. Most other sites are showing that the crossover has already happened, or that it is likely to happen by the end of the month.
More interesting trends can be observed if you switch between continents. South America saw Chrome outdo Firefox way back in April, and Chrome is already ahead of Internet Explorer usage by close on 10%. Some suggested reasons for South America’s quick uptake of Chrome include the fact that Google’s social networking site, Orkut, has proved to be most successful in this region. Apparently IE had some quirks with the Orkut UI, and Chrome just seemed to be the obvious choice when interfacing with other Google products. Another feasible reason for this is that internet connections and home computers in South America are generally a bit slower, so a lean browser results in a better overall user experience.
Chrome took Firefox’s place in Asia back in September, while in Europe, Africa and North America Chrome still has some catching up to do if it wants second place. That doesn’t mean that it isn’t going to happen. Certainly the gap is rapidly closing, and it is clear that once people take to Chrome, they don’t leave. Since we’re at the time of year where people like to make crazy predictions, looking closely at Chrome’s growth over the last year, I would expect it to jump ahead of Internet Explorer midway through next year, and unless something crazy happens it should have more than half of all Internet users using it by the end of 2012.
Of course, that sort of prediction is a little bit enthusiastic. It will really depend a lot more on how quickly mobile internet usage increases. Currently, among Mobile devices, Safari is the king of browsers. That just suggests that iPhone users tend to browse a whole lot more than anybody else. With tablet PC’s starting to flood the market, we’re going to see some big shifts in browser choice thanks to these new devices. Since a lot of them run Android, we could see Google pushing Chrome usage even further on these systems. That may make my predictions a little conservative, but who knows.
Times are exciting. We’re seeing a full-scale revolution in terms of people’s preferred technology. As more and more of our day-to-day applications and data storage requirements move out onto the Internet, we are likely to see the browser war heat up to something we haven’t seen since the late 90′s. I’ve tried Chrome a few times, but I generally prefer to use Firefox.
Recently, I tried out Opera and was impressed by its built-in mail client, but I’m already quite happy with the applications that I already use. From my perspective, its quite difficult to determine exactly what motivates people to switch browsers. If you’ve recently switched, I’d be interested to hear what you switched to and your motivations for doing so.