Twitter | Twitter's New Policy On Blocking Posts Is Attacked, And Defended

Suddenly #Twitter lost it's appeal #Twittercensorship twitter.com/NoonArabia/sta...

- (@NoonArabia) January 27, 2012

The move comes at a time when the American company, which already counts more users abroad than in the United States, is growing internationally at a rapid clip.

A study published on Thursday documents that trend in Africa, where use of the social networking service has spiked along with the spread of mobile phones.

The study, conducted by Portland Communications, a London-based public relations company with offices in Nairobi, Kenya, and New York, and the British social media tracking firm Tweetminster , compiled data on 11.5 million posts originating in Africa over the last three months of 2011. Over that period, the two companies found that:

South Africa is the continent's most active country by volume of geo-located Tweets, with over twice as many Tweets (5,030,226 during Q4 2011) as the next most active Kenya (2,476,800). Nigeria (1,646,212), Egypt (1,214,062) and Morocco (745,620) make up the remainder of the top five most active countries.

Beatrice Karanja , a former BBC journalist who runs the Kenya office of Portland Communications, wrote in an accompanying news release posted on African news sites that the group found that Twitter users in the continent were younger and more likely to use mobile devices to connect to the service.

"Given the explosion in mobile usage across the continent, and the increasingly availability and falling price of Internet-ready devices, this makes it all the more likely that the Twitter revolution has only just begun," she wrote. Below is a visualization of the data:

The study, apparently aimed at businesses seeking to reach African audiences, was a bit of good public relations for the company, contrasting strongly with the talk on Friday of #TwitterCensorship and #TwitterBlackout, a proposed boycott.

Twitter could have done a better job of explaining the new policy, one technology writer said, for example, by describing how posts were previously being blocked and contrasting it to the new system. Twitter already works with Chilling Effects, a project of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and several law schools, to maintain a database of the take-down requests it receives .

The technology blog The Next Web also argues that Twitter has made it very easy to read a post that might be blocked in some countries. And because the new policy involves publishing information about where the posting was blocked, users will now have more information about removal requests than they had before.