Twitter, the internet social network, is developing technology that it hopes will prevent the Chinese and Iranian governments from being able to censor its users.
Evan Williams, the chief executive and co-founder of Twitter, which has been credited with helping anti-government protesters in Iran to organise resistance, said Twitter was working on ”interesting hacks” to stop any blocking by foreign governments.
Mr Williams, speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, said he admired Google for confronting the Chinese government over censorship and cyber-attacks on its service, but it was too small a company to take a similar stand.
”We are partially blocked in China and other places and we were in Iran as well. The most productive way to fight that is not by trying to engage China and other governments whose very being is against what we are about. I am hopeful there are technological ways around these barriers,” he said.
Mr Williams said Twitter had an advantage in evading government censors from operating as a network of internet and mobile applications, rather than as a single website. ”Twitter is a network that is accessed in thousands of ways,” he said.
The contrast between the differing approaches, of two favorite U.S. service providers, to Chinese censorship is apparent. Google confronts the government directly. Twitter will depend on technology. Very interesting
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