Just a quick note on a story I'm looking into. I haven't yet confirmed this on Twitter's end, but it seems that the admins over there can label your tweets as "Anti-Social." Doing so removes your tweets from search results. It's an interesting solution to the eternal problem of ugliness on the Internet.

I'm going to stop by Twitter's offices tomorrow and try to get a comment. At present, I've found this other blog mentioning the "Anti-Social" effect. In that case, a genuinely offensive individual was harassing a few users, and got himself removed from Twitter's search results.

There are others, though, who are censored from Twitter search for less obvious reasons. The real net effect here is that the search results you get on Twitter are filtered through this "anti-social" colander. You can still see tweets referring to the username that has been deemed "anti-social," but you cannot see their tweets in search results.

Is this an egregious abridgement of free speech, or simple way of making Twitter less abrasive? One thing's for sure, there is no rhyme nor reason to what Twitter feeds are being deemed "anti-social," and that is the real source of concern here.

Megan Phelps, for example, is entirely searchable, despite her constant homophobic tweeting, while other users are filtered simply by reputation in other social media outlets. Of course, this all enters into the tricky area of what speech can be limited on public forums. And, for that matter, is filtering search results actually a limit on free speech?

We'll see what Twitter says tomorrow. The method of their filtration isn't necessarily a problem, but the vetting process for who and what gets censored could be troublesome. Anyone else out there have experience being filtered out of search results on Twitter?