When Twitter Blocks Tweets, It’s #Outrage - NYTimes.com

This article raises a provocative issue for social networking tools around the world: "The announcement signals the choice that a service like Twitter has to make about its own existence: Should it be more of a free-speech tool that can be used in defiance of governments, as happened during the Arab Spring protests, or a commercial venture that necessarily must obey the laws of the lands where it seeks to attract customers and eventually make money?"

Twitter allows users to manually set their locations -- outside restrictive countries, for example -- or choose "worldwide" and see everything. That circumvents the blocking system.