Yesterday, Twitter announced that it would be censoring tweets moving forward, based on laws where the tweet originated from.

Along with the hashtag streams of #TwitterCensored and #TwitterBlackout, which are comprised of tweets outside of the United States sharing displeasure for the recent announcement from Twitter.

Among those displeased is the non-profit organization Reporters Without Borders, which explains its mission like this:

In the United States, Reporters Without Borders is a 501c3 organization carrying out the mission to protect and defend journalists working both internationally and in the United States. With an office in Washington, DC the US team works with the US media, political leaders, non-government groups and the American public to further press freedom.

The organization has written an open letter to Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, asking him to re-consider the move, calling it “too vague”. Here are a few key excerpts from the letter:

Reporters Without Borders, an organization that defends freedom of information worldwide, would like to share with you its deep concern about yesterday’s announcement on the official Twitter blog of a new policy under which tweets may be censored in some countries, according to each country’s different criteria.

We urge you to reverse this decision, which restricts freedom of expression and runs counter to the movements opposed to censorship that have been linked to the Arab Spring, in which Twitter served as a sounding board. By finally choosing to align itself with the censors, Twitter is depriving cyberdissidents in repressive countries of a crucial tool for information and organization.

We are very disturbed by this decision, which is nothing other than local level censorship carried out in cooperation with local authorities and in accordance with local legislation, which often violates international free speech standards. Twitter’s position that freedom of expression is interpreted differently from country to country is inacceptable. This fundamental principle is enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Questioning how this new approach will be carried out, the organization gives an example that would not be good for Twitter users:

The way this is defined is too vague and leaves the door open to all kinds of abuse. Are you going to act in response to a court decision? Or, as is the case in China, will just a phone call from a government official or a local police station suffice to justify denying access to content? Are you going to limit yourselves to censoring tweets after they have been posted or, if faced with a flood of official requests, will you establish a system of prior censorship based on subjects or keyword defined by censors?

Seeking more clarity on the policy, Reporters Without Borders suggests that the social network, which has been key during international protests, could mute them entirely:

Does your new policy mean that references on Twitter to Arab revolutions and demonstrations in Manama will no longer be accessible in Bahrain? Will Vietnamese using your social network from their country no longer be able to tweet about bauxite mining’s harmful impact on the environment? Are you going to block tweets about the demands of Turkey’s Kurdish minority? Will Russian Internet users see their criticisms of the government censored?

The letter, which you can read in its entirety here, asks many important questions that Twitter should most certainly answer in a future blog post about the matter. We offered suggestions on how to get around these new potential restrictions, but the Reporters Without Borders letter does bring some interesting suggestions on why Twitter decided to move forward with this decision. For example, could Twitter be deciding to participate in forms of censorship just to make its way back to China, where it has been blocked along with Facebook?

Unfortunately, the announcement from Twitter was indeed vague, as Reporters Without Borders points out, so that leads all of us to try and make sense of it on our own. And that’s never a good thing.

Today, we wrote about a phone call made by New York entrepeneur Amanda Peyton due to her concerns about the proposed PROTECT IP Act (PIPA). She called the office of her local Senator, Chuck Schumer and asked questions about why Schumer was supporting PIPA.

During that call, Peyton claimed to have gotten a shocking response to her question:

The first question I asked was “why does the Senator support this legislation?”

The guy on the other end of the phone said: “well, he’s a co-sponsor so he’s not changing his position.”

He must have known why I was calling.

Asked the same question again. This time the reply I got this time was different: “Senator Schumer is in favor of censoring the Internet.”

Senator Schumer’s representatives reached out to us with a statement denying that the Senator is in favor of censoring the Internet, as Peyton claims she was told on the phone.

Spokesperson Mike Morey had this to say:

It is absurd to suggest that Sen. Schumer, who led the charge against the assault on net neutrality, would support censoring the Internet; he unequivocally does not.

The statement doesn’t call out Amanda Peyton personally, but states that the idea of the Senator supporting censorship on the web is not the case. Either she heard something that wasn’t said, or the person who said it should find other work. I imagine that the phones were ringing off the hook at Schumer’s office today about this.

Ayman Yousef Mansour has become the second Egyptian, since the fall of former president Hosni Mubarak, to be sentenced to 3 years in jail for online self-expression.

Unlike Maikel Nabil whose three year sentence was for a blog post deemed insulting to the military, Mansour’s crime took place on Facebook, and has been deemed insulting to Islam.

According to the official MENA news agency, Mansour was tried in a criminal court, and his ruling stated that he “intentionally insulted the dignity of the Islamic religion and attacked it with insults and ridicule on Facebook.” While it remains unclear exactly what the posts contained, Egyptian daily, Al Masry Al Youm reported that the court stated that the posts on the Facebook page threatened national unity.

Police tracked Mansour online, arresting him in August, and today, the court found him to be “in contempt of religion, ” a charge which can lead to a sentencing of anywhere from six months to five years in prison.

Speaking about the charge, Heba Morayef of Human Rights Watch told AP, that it ”is a very vague provision, and it has long been the recommendation of human rights groups to remove that provision.”

It’s possible to check if a site has been blocked by the Iranian authorities using the site, Blocked in Iran, and testing The Next Web we discovered we are in fact blocked, joining the ranks of Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, Tumblr, WordPress, LiveJournal, The Guardian and many many more sites.

Testing many other news, business and tech sites, we found that most of them had not been blocked, and we can only guess as to what it was that triggered the block. Our coverage of the Iranian government’s consistent efforts to control its citizens Internet access, and thwart efforts made by others to grant them access, as well as their attempts to block access to certain sites they deem threatening, or even cripple Internet speeds, may have had a little something to do with the move.

We most recently reported that Iran’s filtering system had faltered briefly, but the filter is very much back in place, blocking not only social networking, blogging and community sites, but even blocking access to VPNs which would make it easier for Iranian residents to get online.

All jokes aside, this is an extremely serious matter. Having experienced firsthand a government’s attempt to cut its citizens off not only from certain sites, but from the Internet as a whole, it is wholeheartedly disappointing to find that when you attempt to shed light on the suffocating censorship tactics in use by governments like that of Iran, you become the subject of that very same censorship.

“I will no longer accept interview requests from NPR as long as they are going to practice a form of censorship,” said former Arkansas governor and Fox News talk show host Mike Huckabee today. He was responding to the announcement that Fox News analyst Juan Williams had been let go from a similar role at NPR. The firing was a result of comments made by Williams on Bill O’Reilly’s show, in which he said he gets “worried” and “nervous” whenever he gets on a plane with people wearing Muslim garb.

There have been hundreds of conservative bloggers and commentators who have attacked NPR in the wake of this firing, claiming political censorship and a liberal bias (the censorship issue stems from funding public radio receives from the government, though a large percentage of its revenue comes from private donors). Bill O’Reilly accused NPR of being a “left-wing outfit that wants one opinion.” Fox News contributor Bernie Goldberg told a Yahoo reporter, “So Juan Williams is fired for saying something the liberals at NPR find controversial? One more piece of evidence that liberals have forgotten how to be liberal.”

Reading over the commentary in many of the most popular conservative blogs, I wondered if these online pundits expressed similar outrage at CNN’s firing of Middle East editor Octavia Nasr for an offense that didn’t even occur on a major news outlet. CNN’s reason for terminating Nasr in July was for a now-deleted tweet that merely expressed sadness for the death of Sayyed Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, a beloved Muslim leader in the Middle East whose death was mourned even by our own allies. Because Fadlallah had been reported to be a “spiritual leader”of Hezbollah by some sources, neo-conservatives accused Nasr of being a terrorist sympathizer despite the fact that her tweet didn’t include any support for Hezbollah actions or policies.

So how did conservative bloggers’ coverage of Nasr’s firing compare to Williams’? The conservative Hot Air said today that an “NPR opinion journalist had better not admit to having a normal human reaction about potential for terrorism nine years after 3,000 Americans got killed by radical Muslims on commercial air flights, or else.” This was, the blogger said, “an object lesson about the range of opinion tolerated by management.” But with the Nasr firing, this same blog asked whether “after having outed herself as a Hezbollah sympathizer,” CNN owed “its viewers and readers a complete accounting of their coverage in the Middle East and a complete explanation of Nasr’s role in it?”

The conservative media watchdog Newsbusters claimed today that “Juan Williams has done nothing wrong” and that “what he said echoes what the vast majority of Americans believe.” This is the complete opposite of the view it took on Nasr’s rather anodyne tweet. “CNN has finally taken a step in the right direction in removing a terrorist sympathizer from their ranks,” the blogger wrote several months ago. “It’s a shame it took this amount of publicity and attention from organizations like the MRC to get the job done, as Octavia Nasr should never have been granted the position of authority to begin with.”

Instapundit’s Glenn Reynolds included several links to stories criticizing NPR for the firing. “Is that all it takes to get someone fired at NPR?” the libertarian blogger asked rhetorically. I did a search on Reynold’s blog and didn’t find any posts matching the keywords “Octavia Nasr.” But Reynold’s fellow Pajamas Media bloggers had plenty to say about about both firings. “While awaiting the inevitable gig with Al-Jazeera, Nasr might want to console herself with a nice tasty dish of Helen Thomas’ Palestinian Chicken,” one blogger joked back on July 7. “It’s exploding with flavor!” This is the same guy who linked heavily to critics of the Williams firing.

Big Journalism, a conservative media watchdog owned by Andrew Breitbart (who got a black woman fired from a government position by posting a video maliciously edited to make her look like a racist), said back in July that it “would be tempted to commend CNN for firing Nasr and move on” but that it didn’t want to let “CNN off the hook too easily.” Today, this same site echoed the “censorship” argument. “A taxpaying-funded organization fired someone over their free speech? No! Shocker!”

Of course many of these bloggers would try to argue that CNN’s firing of Nasr was completely different. For instance, many are pointing out that NPR receives government funding and argue that this means it’s engaging in government censorship. But NPR is a nonprofit that receives a large percentage of its revenue from corporate and private donors. It’s not a government entity, merely one of thousands of nonprofits that receive government grants. Some of these bloggers would say that Nasr was a news correspondent, unlike Williams who was an analyst. But many of these same bloggers cheered on the firing of Helen Thomas after her YouTube remarks about Israel; Thomas had been an opinion columnist for Hearst Newspapers since 2000 and had only been an actual news correspondent when she worked for UPI before that.

Perhaps the most ironic attacks on NPR came from Fox News contributor and right wing blogger Michelle Malkin, who said today that “government-funded NPR has apparently caved into left-wing attack dogs on the Internet.” Malkin is claiming censorship now, but back in 2006 Malkin used her blog and its large audience to promote anonymous quotes from military officials who had arrested a Pulitzer-winning AP photographer named Bilal Hussein. Hussein had been detained by US forces without any formal charges, and for months Malkin and other conservative bloggers accused the photographer of aiding terrorists. Hussein was eventually released by the US government almost two years after it arrested him without charges. Many human rights activists and lawyers claimed that the photographer’s arrest was a form of censorship, given that his photography painted a gruesome picture of an unpopular American war.

Malkin has yet to show any remorse for the role she played in attacking Hussein during his detention, even after his release. So what’s the difference between Juan Williams and Bilal Hussein? Well, Williams made statements about how it’s understandable to be afraid of Muslims, whereas Hussein actually was a Muslim. For Malkin, this may be the only distinction that matters.