When Free Speech Goes Public

Elias Groll wonders whether a publicly traded Twitter “will have to sacrifice its values, at least somewhat, on the high altar of the quarterly earnings report”:

Twitter has already run into trouble abroad, where governments, both democratic and otherwise, have not taken too kindly to a service that lets anyone and everyone broadcast thoughts onto the web. At the height of the protest movement in Egypt that brought down Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptian government blocked Twitter. During a wave of rioting in Britain in 2011, Prime Minister David Cameron threatened to shut the service down. (He did not.) In July of this year, French courts forced Twitter to hand over user data to help authorities identify the authors of anti-Semitic and racist tweets. In China, the service is blocked entirely.

For a young start-up with private investors, shutdowns like these pose no serious problems. But how will Wall Street react to service outages? Each time the service goes down, Twitter is effectively losing money, and that’s something investors seem unlikely to accept. Thus, there will be an incentive for the company to make concessions to governments for the sake of achieving greater market share.