The Tweets Must Flow
Our goal is to instantly connect people everywhere to what is most meaningful to them. For this to happen, freedom of expression is essential. Some Tweets may facilitate positive change in a repressed country, some make us laugh, some make us think, some downright anger a vast majority of users.
Context & Ripple Effects
Twitter's blog had spent the previous eighteen months on product mechanics — the A Better Twitter overhaul in September 2010 and the iPhone client the spring before — which makes a manifesto-style post stand out. 'The Tweets Must Flow' also consciously reprises the phrasing of its 2009 May The Tweets Be With You note, turning an old joke into a policy statement.
TechCrunch's same-day pickup framed the post as an allusion to WikiLeaks and the #Egypt hashtag, so a values statement arrived already loaded with geopolitical reading. That framing is the story: Twitter chose the week of heavy #Egypt traffic to declare, on the record, that some tweets anger a vast majority of users and will stay up anyway.
First-order effects
- Users tweeting under #Egypt and around WikiLeaks material get an explicit public commitment that political speech is core product rather than liability — and every future removal now gets measured against that post.
- For Twitter itself, the declaration raises the bar internally: the company has published the principle it will be held to the next time a government asks it to take something down.
Second-order effects
- Governments requesting takedowns now face a platform that has pre-committed in public, raising the reputational cost of each compliance or refusal decision.
- Rival platforms inherit the comparison: once one major network states free expression is essential to its mission, press and users apply the same yardstick to everyone else's silence.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, content policy stops being a domestic trust-and-safety matter and becomes a diplomatic signal — platform statements and takedown decisions read as geopolitical acts by governments and activists alike.
The trend: Platform free-expression commitments are hardening from blog rhetoric into public benchmarks that governments and users test case by case.