Twitter wants to be tool to thwart censorship

(Twitter)

Twitter co-founders on Wednesday expressed hope that the globally popular microblogging service will help thwart efforts by China to censor information in that country.

"Censorship sucks," Twitter co-founder Evan Williams said during an on-stage chat on the opening day of a Chirp developers conference at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco.

"We would love to enable freedom of expression and freedom of information in China."

Twitter has no plans to open an office in China but is working to make the service available in Chinese, according to company co-founder Biz Stone.

Meanwhile, Twitter wants to avoid putting computer servers in countries where oppressive regimes might want to get their hands on the San Francisco-based firm's data.

"We have to translate the service and make it accessible in as many languages as possible without putting any servers into these countries," Stone said. "It just doesn't make sense."

Google last month stopped filtering its search results and effectively shut down its Chinese search engine, re-routing mainland users to its uncensored site in Hong Kong.