Exclusive: Twitter closes major loophole for government-censored tweets

At some point in the last few days, Twitter closed a loophole that allowed users to view tweets and profiles that are censored due to government and court requests, Entrackr has found. Twitter implements account and tweet blocking in a particular country by displaying a message for that country’s users saying that “This tweet has been withheld” there due to local laws or a legal demand. 

But a significant loophole in this policy allowed users in any country to escape censorship of tweets. Simply changing an account’s country from the Account settings allowed users to see all content that was available freely in the country of their selection. This is no longer the case globally. Twitter now appears to use users’ IP addresses to figure out how to apply censorship for their Twitter feed.

With a Twitter account set to Canada, Entrackr reviewed tweets that are restricted in India and in Germany through a Virtual Private Network (VPN) connected to servers around the world. We found that when using a German VPN, regardless of a user’s country setting, German censorship applied. Similarly, when accessing profiles and tweets that were restricted in India through a normal internet connection, that content remained inaccessible regardless of what country we set for the Twitter account.

This loophole cut both ways, interestingly enough, ‘importing’ censorship from one jurisdiction to another if a user chose to take advantage of it; in 2019, CNBC reported that some users around the world switched their account country to Germany to see less neo-Nazi content, which Twitter censors more in that country due to extensive German regulation of hate speech on social media. 

Twitter did not respond to a query from Entrackr.

This loophole was a major unspoken concession to Twitter users who were intent on escaping local censorship in countries like India; it essentially allowed users to view content that was withheld in their country without having to use relatively sophisticated workarounds like VPNs or proxies. 

The loophole was especially important in countries like India, where the government has a track record of censoring tweets for blatantly political reasons. Last year, during the disastrous second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, Twitter was ordered to pull down tweets from prominent activists, journalists and celebrities that criticized the government’s handling of the outbreak. 

The censorship has only grown since. Twitter in July sued the Indian government challenging some of these censorship orders. Twitter was alleged to have been forced to hire Indian government agents in its New Delhi office, according to a whistleblower complaint earlier this week.