Both Twitter and the FBI have unveiled plans to monitor social media content, guardian.co.uk reports.
The FBI has unveiled its plans to “scrape” information form social networking sites, then plot the results against a map to create an “early warning system against domestic and global threats”.
Whilst the scheme is still in its infancy, the FBI has already contacted contractors for estimates on cost of creation and running.
Twitter, meanwhile, has unveiled its new ability to censor tweets on a country-by-country basis.
Previously, if the social networking site decided to remove a tweet for legal reasons it would be deleted from the site forever. Now the site has the ability to remove tweets from view for a country, but still leave it visible to those elsewhere.
Countries such as France and Germany are amongst those expected to need the service more than others, with laws making the posting of pro-Nazi comments illegal.
Twitter took the action during its move into a more international realm and acknowledged the notion that individual countries “have different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression,” a Twitter spokesperson told BBC News.
“Starting today, we give ourselves the ability to reactively withhold content from users in a specific country – while keeping it available in the rest of the world.”
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