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Twitter will accept only English tweets from February 29, 2011 on

After the US ministry of justice has subpoenad Twitter to disclose records of and information on users who might be sympathetic to Wikileaks, Twitter decided to show full cooperation and volunteered to take this one step further. As the US intelligence agencies complain about the difficulties to quickly parse tweets in non-english languages, Twitter will - beginning February 29, 2011 - only accept tweets written in english. Programmers close to the company say they have implemented and tested the necessary parsing software and are comfortable with the speed and smoothness of operation. In a future upgrade it is intended to connect with Googles translation services so that non-english utterances can be transformed into acceptable language on the fly. Negotiations, sources say, are promising.
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Carsten Hucho said…
Twitter showed spine by successfully challenging the gag order that was attached to the subpoena mentioned above. More here:
"Twitter’s Response to WikiLeaks Subpoena Should Be the Industry Standard" http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/01/twitter
January 11, 2011 at 10:45 PM
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