Twitter Allows for Nations to Ban American Accounts?

I am the president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, whose account Twitter locked because it tweeted a link to a Daily News article that I wrote about Twitter locking my personalaccount. Twitter informs me that the account was locked because the News article contains quotes from the New Zealand mass killer, and New Zealand and Australia have laws against sharing the manifestos of shooters.

As a Twitter representative emailed me: “Due to the safety of Twitter users and regulations abroad, Twitter does not allow linking to content that includes excerpts of manifestos of mass shooters.” Earlier automated responses from Twitter had offered no such information, with the explanation field left blank. I was able to use a connection to ask what was happening, but other victims of Twitter’s censorship may not even get an explanation.

The explanation seems simple enough, but there is a problem. Lots of other accounts have tweeted a link to that same News piece, including the New York Daily News itself to its over 700,000 followers. More than 80 other accounts retweeted the link, some with many more followers than the CPRC. But none of these other accounts have been locked or had posts removed for linking to the article.