Twitter announced plans to censor tweets in specific countries, but only to local readers...
"Until now," Twitter wrote, "the only way we could take account of those countries’ limits was to remove content globally."
The way they put it, you'd think it might have happened once or twice. But until now, Twitter has never taken account of other countries' limits and never removed tweets globally because of them.
Like a "special offer" tag with a conspicuously visible original price that was never actually charged, this encourages the reader to think that someone, somewhere, was already paying in full. It hides the current tally: zero tweets blocked at the request of foreign governments...
...these well-muddied waters led many reporters to rephrase Twitter's claim into an explicit reduction of censorship, rather than its inauguration...
"Previously, the tweet would disappear for everyone," reported CNN, about tweets that never disappeared previously.
